The Fortnightly Review in Review: March 2025

Notes from the editor on our first issue

August Lepère, Spring (c. 1909)

In like a lion came the new New Series of TFR, a new-old literary venture that my team and I are steering through the uncharted waters of this unsettled time. (How many metaphors did I just mix?) April is the cruelest month, like the man said, but March has been no slouch as people around the world have absorbed the wanton cruelty and pig-ignorant triumphalism of the new right, whose outrages have been magnified by the cultural disaster that goes by the innocuous name of “the vibe shift.” Dismal signs and portents abound: college students, they say, are now functionally illiterate and books are outmoded; Trump is going to invade Greenland the way he’s invaded the Kennedy Center, and there’s no one who can plausibly stop him. I could go on, but you already know this—part of the crisis of our time is how much we already know before we pick up our phones every morning, how perfectly the phrase shocked but not surprised describes the affect of the age.

The darkness surrounds us; what can a literary magazine do against it? Well: we can speak up for an untimely literacy; we can rededicate ourselves to the work of the imagination that predicates reality, which they’re trying to take from us by cramming the doors of perception with slop. Substack is an imperfect platform for this—the master’s tools will never disassemble the master’s house—but I believe it can still be a vehicle for poems, for prose, and for the cosmopolitan spirit. A few moments of contemplation in your in-box; a form of engagement with reality more complex and vital than a knee-jerk reaction. There has to be an outside to the outrage machine—something I feel I deeply need, if only to permit me to return to the discursive fray with something of my mind intact. If you’re reading this, perhaps you need it too.

So our voyage begins! We close out our March issue:

• with my interview with former U.S. Poet Laureate Robert Pinsky, who urged us to consult with ancestors;

• with poems by Rae Armantrout, James Dowthwaite, and Peter Robinson;

• with poems by Klaus Merz translated from the German by our Translations Editor, Marc Vincenz;

• with new fiction by Lance Olsen;

• with a dispatch from Japan by our Dispatches Editor, Cassandra Atherton

• with reviews of new books by Yuval Sharon and Julian Stannard.

In April, we look forward to new poems by Michael Anania, Amy Glynn, Ernest Hilbert, Jorge Sánchez, and C. Dale Young; new fiction by Christine Hume; Jeremy Wilson’s interview with Chicago author Vincent Francone about A Book No One Wants; poems by Maciej Robert, translated from the Polish by Piotr Florczyk; Donald Gardner’s review of a new poetry collection by Desmond Eagan; a literary dispatch from Paris courtesy of the indefatigable Cassandra Atherton; and K. Prevallet’s exploration of the poetry of Will Alexander. Much, much more to come!

If you like what we do, please subscribe, please share. We are committed, in the teeth of what Substack says it’s for, to keeping our content free; that said, paid subscriptions help to support our work and are deeply appreciated.

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Joshua Corey is Editor-in-Chief of The Fortnightly Review. A poet, critic, translator, and novelist, he received his MFA from the University of Montana in 1999, was a Stegner Fellow in Poetry at Stanford University from 1999-2001, and earned a PhD in English Literature from Cornell University in 2007. His books include How Long Is Now (Spuyten Duyvil, 2022), a novel; Hannah and the Master (MadHat Press, 2021), a poetic masque on the philosophical love affair of Hannah Arendt and Martin Heidegger; The Transcendental Circuit: Otherworlds of Poetry (MadHat Press, 2017), a collection of critical prose; Partisan of Things (Kenning Editions, 2016), a new translation, with Jean-Luc Garneau, of Francis Ponge's Le parti pris des choses; The Barons (Omnidawn Publishing, 2014), a poetry collection; Beautiful Soul: An American Elegy (Spuyten Duyvil, 2014), a novel; and the Dorset-prize winning Severance Songs (Tupelo Press, 2011), a collection of post-sonnets. With G.C. Waldrep he co-edited The Arcadia Project: North American Postmodern Pastoral (Ahsahta Press, 2012). He maintains a Substack, Dream of a Rarebit Fiend, where he comments on movies, literature, and Patrick O'Brian's Aubrey-Maturin series of historical novels.