LR at the American Bookbinders Museum: A Celebration of National Poetry Month

LR at ABM

Happy National Poetry Month! We’re back from AWP Los Angeles and are ready to take on April full-steam ahead.

This month, we are pleased to announce that Lantern Review is collaborating with the American Bookbinders Museum, a new and incredibly unique space in San Francisco that’s dedicated to the history of bookbinding, to celebrate National Poetry Month. Together with the museum, we’ll be producing two special events that showcase Asian American poetry in conversation with bookmaking and the printed page:

On April 16th at 7 pm, we will be hosting a reading at the museum featuring six award-winning Asian American poets (Barbara Jane Reyes, Brynn Saito, Debbie Yee, Candy Shue, Jason Bayani, and Monica Mody) who will be presenting work that explores the thematic connections between bookbinding, paper, Asian American history, and the San Francisco Bay Area itself. Books will be for sale after the reading, and poets will be available to sign copies for audience members. Admission is $5.00 ($2.50 for students, children under 10 free; no one will be turned away for lack of funds), with all proceeds going toward supporting the museum’s operations. (Please see our Facebook event for this reading here.)

We also invite you to join us on April 21st from 5:30 to 8:00 pm, when we’ll take over the museum’s regular Third Thursday event with more Asian American poetry. For this free, public, drop-in event, mounted broadsides of some of the poems read on the 16th will be on display in the museum’s gallery, and visitors will be able to interact with and respond to the work in the context of the binding and printing machines and archival materials in the gallery by creating hand-crafted mini poetry chapbooks of their own. (Please see our Facebook event for this evening here.)

Both events will take place in the American Bookbinders Museum’s building at 355 Clementina Street, San Francisco, CA 94103. If you’re based in the Bay Area, we hope you’ll be able to come out and join us on one or both evenings! We are so excited to get to partner with the museum and (now that we are officially based in the Bay) are thrilled to have the opportunity to celebrate Poetry Month by highlighting some of the amazing Asian American poetry that is being produced right in our backyard.

What will you be doing to celebrate National Poetry Month this year? Will you be attending any local events celebrating Asian American poetry in your community? Please let us know about them in the comments, on Twitter, or on Facebook—we’d love to help you spread the word!

The LR Guide to AWP 2016

The LR Guide to AWP 2016

It’s that time of year again! AWP 2016 starts this week, and as has been our tradition in the past, we’ve put together a guide to APIA poetry-related happenings at the conference, featuring panels, readings, and offsite events that might be of interest to our readers, below. As a bonus, we’ve also created a free companion to the bookfair that you can download at the end of this post. So get out your planners and calendar apps! We hope you’ll find this information useful—but even more so, we hope you’ll enjoy getting to engage with the extraordinary wealth of events celebrating the creation, dissemination, and teaching of APIA poetry at AWP this year.

Please note: this list is by no means comprehensive. We have tried our best to curate a sampling of APIA poetry- and publishing-related items below, but we encourage our readers to check out any of the vast number of other panels, readings, and offsite events featuring individual APIA writers (including many past LR contributors) at the conference this year.

Where to Find Us

The Lantern Review team will be attending the conference this year, but unlike in previous years, we won’t be stationed at a table in the bookfair. Instead, you can find us floating around at some of the panels and readings listed below. We’ll also be selling books for Kundiman at the Literaoke offsite event on Friday night, and you can catch us at the Asian American literary caucus on Thursday evening. We’d love it if you stopped by to say “hello”!

Can’t make it out to Los Angeles for the conference but still want to be in the know? Follow us on Twitter or Instagram (@LanternReview) for live updates throughout the weekend.

Panels and Readings

Thursday, March 31st

9:00 am to 10:15 am

R115. The Active Politics of Queer/Feminist of Color and Indigenous Feminist Publishing Movements. (Lisa Moore, Felicia Montes, Audrey Castillo, Kim Tran, Casandra Lopez) | Room 408 A, LA Convention Center, Meeting Room Level

R117. Welcome to the Party: Asian American Open Mics in Southern California as Sites of Resistance. (Janice Sapigao, Eddy M. Gana, Jr., Myca Tran, Stephanie Sajor, Sean Miura) | Room 409 AB, LA Convention Center, Meeting Room Level

Continue reading “The LR Guide to AWP 2016” →

LR News: We’re Back!

Iris and Mia say, "Hooray! We're back!"
LR cofounders Iris and Mia announcing the good news.

That’s right—we’re back! We’ve officially ended our hiatus and are thrilled to announce that we’re rested and ready for this new season of Lantern Review.

For the very first time, our cofounders are living on the same coast, not to mention in the same geographic region: the San Francisco Bay Area! We look forward to discovering what it means to rebuild our editorial endeavor in the context of the Bay Area’s thriving literary arts scene, in the wonderful company of so many other editors, poets, publishers, and artists of color. We also foresee many more exciting opportunities to cultivate regionally based community, though we’ll continue to function with our national and international readership in mind.

Along with an eventual relaunch of the magazine, you can expect new, exciting content on our blog, which we’ll continue to update regularly, and a fresh look—which, hopefully, you’re already enjoying. We’re starting small, but, as before, our goal is to provide a clear, up-to-date sense of what’s happening in the Asian American poetry scene and areas of related interest.

Later this month, you can also expect to see us at AWP. We’ll be there, cruising the book fair, attending panels, and looking to connect with Lantern Review readers and contributors—both past and future. We’ll be posting more soon about where we’ll be during the conference, so if you plan to attend, be sure to look out for that information, and please come find us in LA!

For now, stay tuned for more updates on our blog, and if we don’t see you at AWP 2016, we hope we’ll get to hang out with you sometime in the Bay!

LR News: A Season for Sabbath

We're on the road to new things.
We’re on the road to new things.

To our beloved readers and members of the LR community:

In the four and a half years since Lantern Review first came into existence, we’ve been incredibly blessed. Over the course of six issues and hundreds of blog posts, tweets, and Facebook interactions, we’ve seen this community grow from a tiny little magazine that was making a little noise in the APIA literary community to a tiny little magazine with a steady community of contributors and readers that spans continents, that gets to make bigger noise at events like AWP (through projects like this map and other collaborations with our APIA publishing colleagues), and that continues to blossom year by year. It’s been a busy last four and a half years. A fruitful last four and a half years. A season in which we’ve been continually humbled by the breadth and strength of the APIA lit community, and for which we are unspeakably grateful.

But, as it’s sometimes said, there is a season for everything. And now, it so happens, is a season in which we (the editors) need to rest for a little while. This is a decision that’s been some time in coming. We love this project deeply, love working on it together, and have loved seeing the magazine, blog, and surrounding community grow in the past four and a half years. But running a two-woman editorial operation of LR’s scale requires an enormous amount of time and attention, and as new developments in our personal and family lives have come to light over the course of the last year, we’ve simply found ourselves in need of a break. And so, as of today, we are putting Lantern Review (both blog and magazine) on extended hiatus.

We should emphasize, first and foremost, that this does not mean the ultimate end of LR. Think of this as a “sabbath” (or even as a sabbatical)—a season in which we take some time away to recharge—rather than as the closing of the door for good. At the moment, our plan is to take a year off and to meet again after that time has passed in order to reassess where we stand and whether we are ready to relaunch. We are hoping that by taking a step back to engage in some much-needed time for family, personal projects, and general self-care, we’ll be able to return, eventually, with fresh eyes and new energy.

Practically, this will mean that LR, and all of its avenues of output, will go dark for a time. All of our content to date will, of course, continue to be accessible through the blog and web site. But we will not be posting new blog updates or taking submissions for the next issue of the magazine for a while. Nor will we be tracking contributor news on social media (Facebook or Twitter) or (most likely) promoting the magazine at the AWP 2015 bookfair (though it is possible that we may attend as individual writers). We still have one upcoming event that we’re participating in during the month of May (a very exciting collaborative reading that we’ll be doing with several other APIA lit mags!), and we will be continuing to provide social media updates about that as more details become available. We will also continue to be accessible via email, which we will check intermittently (perhaps once a month) throughout the hiatus. And of course, we want to be available to respond to any immediate concerns you might have about how the hiatus might look, or how it will affect upcoming plans for the spring, so please don’t hesitate to email us if there’s a lingering question that is weighing on your mind (we will still be checking our account daily for the next couple of weeks).

We wouldn’t be here without our community, and it’s thanks to you and your constant support that the last four and a half years have been such an incredible joy. And so, it’s with nothing but bone-deep gratitude that we sign off for now. Thank you for demonstrating to us, over the years, the brilliance and diversity and freshness of the work being created within the context of the wonderfully messy, slippery, complex thing that is APIA poetry. We have learned so much about community, about compassion, about the beauty of collaboration, the importance of continued debate and discussion, and the necessity of poetry itself. Getting to edit Lantern Review and converse with you has challenged and matured us as much as individuals and artists as it has taught us how to be good editors. We encourage you not to let the momentum go—to keep writing and reading and talking about APIA poetry; to continue the discussions that have already begun here. We wish you all the best in the weeks and months to come and hope to see you again, eventually, on the other side. In the meantime, please keep on carrying the torch!

To APIA poetry and to community, always!

In peace and light, as ever,
Iris & Mia

LR News: Issue 6 Is Here!

LR Issue 6 Cover
LR Issue 6

This morning, it’s our pleasure to announce that the sixth issue of Lantern Review is now live! Featuring poems by Michelle Chan Brown, Rachel Ronquillo Gray, Lee Herrick, Matthew Olzmann, Brynn Saito, Nicky Sa-eun Schildkraut, and Shelley Wong, and a special feature on translation in process that highlights the work of Fiona Sze-Lorrain and Don Mee Choi, Issue 6 is slim, but by no means short on quality. Even the cover art has a story of its own: the words that appear behind the negative space of the butterfly cutouts are actually pieces of text from one of the poems in the issue—Nicky Sa-eun Schildkraut’s “in the town of colorblind.” Issue 6 has been a joy to curate, and we are exceptionally proud of the cohesiveness and strength of the body of work that appears within its pages. We only hope that you’ll find it as utterly pleasurable to read as we found it to put together.

To enter the issue, click here or on the cover image at the top left of this post. We’d love to hear what you think about the issue, so leave us a comment or reach out to us on Twitter or Facebook to let us know. And of course, if you experience any technical issues while browsing, please don’t hesitate to drop us a line at editors [at] lanternreview.com at any time; we’re always grateful for your feedback and will do whatever we can to assist you in improving your reading experience.

A very happy Wednesday to you, and safe travels to those who are traveling to Seattle for AWP.

Many thanks, ever and always, for your continued support. 

Peace and Light,

Iris & Mia
LR Editors

LR News: Happy October! (We’re back!)

Welcome back to another new season here on the LR blog! It’s been quiet here for a bit while we’ve taken our summer hiatus, but it’s October now, and we’re back—with wealth of exciting new content lined up for the months ahead.

This season, you can continue to expect more razor-sharp book reviews, interviews, and column posts contributed by our team of talented staff writers, as well as intermittent editorial updates about the progress of Issue 6, which we plan to release in early 2014.  (Friday Prompts, unfortunately, is on hold for now, while we make some adjustments to our workflow in order to make managing the blog more sustainable for the editorial team). This month, we’ll kick off with Jai Arun Ravine’s dual review of two recent chapbooks by Hoa Nguyen and Ji Yoon Lee, respectively.  In the weeks that follow, you can also look forward to an interview that Wendy Chin-Tanner conducted with Molly Gaudry and a fresh reflection on the purpose of poetry from Henry W. Leung’s column, “Panax Ginseng.”

As always, we welcome your feedback and suggestions, and would love to hear your updates. What are you reading, and what are you writing and thinking about as the last vestiges of summer fade from view and autumn begins in earnest? Have you published somewhere recently? Are you participating in any upcoming APIA literary events that you think we should know about? Leave us a comment, shoot us an email, or tell us on Facebook and Twitter; we’d love to hear from you.

Happy October!

Peace and Light,

Iris & Mia

LR News: Reading Period for Issue 6 Now Open

Issue6SubmitBanner
(Click on the banner above to submit your work to Issue 6).

Happy 4th of July! Summer is fully upon us at last, and we’re happy to announce that the reading period for our 2014 (sixth) issue is now open. Whereas Issue 5’s content focused on a special theme, we’ll be returning to a general submissions pool for Issue 6. Additionally, this issue marks our official transition into publishing the magazine annually, rather than biannually. After more than three years of struggling to keep up with the pace of a twice-a-year schedule, we have decided that it would be in the best interests of the magazine (and our responsibility to you as readers) to amend our publication schedule to just one issue a year. Not only will this provide us with a more realistic time frame in which to complete each issue, but it will also allow us to concentrate on producing content that is more cleanly edited and better designed than before. Issue 6 will therefore come out in 2014, though we will be reading submissions for it this summer.

It is our hope that this new, longer schedule will afford us the freedom to test out new formats and to more thoughtfully curate the content of future issues. Having very much enjoyed our experiment with a themed format with our last issue, we are excited to try introducing new elements in issues to come, including (though not necessarily limited to) different kinds of features and, hopefully, more themed issues, sprinkled in intermittently down the road. As we mentioned earlier, Issue 6 will be a general (non-themed) issue, but we have a special feature section planned for it, and are eager to see what wonderful new work you will share with us during this  reading period.

Submissions for LR Issue 6 will be open through 11:59 p.m. EST on August 1, 2013. To submit your work, please visit our submissions page, where you’ll be able to read our guidelines and proceed to our online form.

We hope you’ll consider sending a few of your best poems our way during this reading period. Many thanks for your continued support, and best of luck to all who submit. We look forward to reading your work!

Peace and light,

Iris & Mia
LR Editors

LR News: National Poetry Month 2013 Giveaway Results

AprilGiveawayBanner

Thank you so much to all of you who entered our 2013 National Poetry Month giveaway!  This weekend, we put the total number of entries (comments) received through a random number generator, and let it choose the number of the winning comment for us:

NPM2013GiveawayResult

And the winner is  . . .

Noel Mariano (comment #13), who writes that he is currently in the midst of reading Barbara Jane Reyes’s Diwata and re-reading Bino Realuyo’s The Gods We Worship Live Next Door.

Here’s a screenshot of his comment:

NPM2013GiveawayWinningComment

Noel will receive a 1-year subscription to the Asian American Literary Review (courtesy of AALR), a copy of Nicky Sa-eun Schildkraut’s Magnetic Refrain (courtesy of Kaya Press), and a copy of Henry W. Leung’s Paradise Hunger (courtesy of the author). Congratulations, Noel!  We hope you’ll enjoy your prize!

Also as promised, each of the first ten commentors to have entered the contest will receive a bundle of five of our poetry starter packs. These lucky ten people are, in the order in which their comments were received:

  1. Rumit Pancholi, who’s reading Li-Young Lee and Garrett Hongo.
  2. Cathy Linh Che, who adores Srikanth Reddy’s Facts for Visitors.
  3. R., who has Myung Mi Kim and Barbara Jane Reyes on the top of their list.
  4. Roberto Ascalon, who’s reading Jon Pineda and looking forward to Jason Bayani’s Amulet.
  5. Michelle Penaloza, who recommends both Eugene Gloria and Luisa Igloria.
  6. Luisa Igloria, who wrote of her love for Paisley Rekdal’s work.
  7. Michelle Lin, who’s enjoying Kimiko Hahn’s The Narrow Road to the Interior at the moment.
  8. Rachelle, who’s reading Brynn Saito and Jason Bayani, and is waiting for Manila Noir (ed. Jessica Hagedorn)
  9. Jane Wong, who recently finished (and loved) Lynn Xu’s Debts and Lessons and also recommends the work of Cathy Park Hong (having recently read Engine Empire) and Myung Mi Kim.
  10. Kristen Eliason, who says she visits and revisits For the Fighting Spirit of the Walnut by Takashi Hiraide, Mad Science in Imperial City by Shanxing Wang, and Incubation: A Space for Monsters by Bhanu Kapil.

We were thrilled to see everyone’s responses. There was a wide range of names mentioned in the thirty-four comments that were left on the original post; Ching-In Chen, Kimiko Hahn, and Li-Young Lee topped the list at 4, 3, and 3 mentions each, while a number of other poets (Jason Bayani, Tarfia Faizullah, Bhanu Kapil, Myung Mi Kim, Karen Llagas, Barbara Jane Reyes, Ocean Vuong, Lynn Xu, and Andre Yang) were mentioned twice. Other writers who showed up on people’s lists included: Arthur Sze, Karen An-Hwei Lee, Dilruba Ahmed, Angie Chuang, Cynthia Dewi Oka, Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha, Kenji Liu, David Maduli, Pos L. Moua, Soul Choj Vang, Ka Vang, Sesshu Foster, Angela Torres, Matthew Olzmann, Koon Woon, Allen Qing Yuan, Beau Sia, Amy Uyematsu, Russell Leong, Mitsuye Yamada, Joel Tan, Tsering Wangmo, Lee Herrick, Hiroshi Kashiwagi, David S. Cho, Bao Phi, Ed Bok Lee, Lois-Ann Yamanaka, Sasha Pimental Chacon, Burlee Vang, Ishle Yi Park, Sally Wen Mao, Lo Kwa Mei-En, and Hoa Nguyen. (To read about these recommendations  in more detail, click here to see the original post). Many commentors also took the time to leave detailed remarks about the work of the poets they’d mentioned. Their recommendations have definitely nudged us to add several names and  titles to our reading lists, and we hope they’ve inspired you, too!

Congratulations to all our winners, and thank you so much again to everyone who entered, as well as to our generous sponsors, AALR, Kaya, and Henry Leung. A very happy tail end of National Poetry Month to you all!  We’ll see you on the flip side, in May, when we’ll continue our celebration of Asian American poetry with more special content for APIA Heritage Month.

LR News: A Giveaway for National Poetry Month 2013

April 2103 Giveaway Post

Happy April! It’s national poetry month, and as usual, we’re celebrating both this month and next (APIA heritage month) on the LR blog with lots of Asian American poetry goodness. This year, for April, we’ll be running an installment of our annual Process Profiles series, and we’ve also teamed up with our friends at the Asian American Literary Review and Kaya Press to offer a giveaway that includes some truly awesome prizes.

First, though, we want to hear from you: what Asian American poets are on your reading list for this April, or what’s one poet whom you’d recommend to people who want to read more Asian American poetry this month? Leave a comment on this post by April 22nd with the name of at least one Asian American poet whose work you love, and you’ll be entered in a random drawing to win a 1-year subscription to AALR, a copy of Nicky Sa-eun Schildkraut’s Magnetic Refrain (reviewed on our blog here), and a copy of our very own Henry W. Leung’s chapbook, Paradise Hunger.

But the APIA poetry love doesn’t stop there! Those of you who follow us on Facebook might remember seeing pictures of the “Poetry Starter Packs” from our AWP display this year—little envelopes containing prompts and ekphrastic/found inspiration that we handed out to passers-by in the bookfair. Well, if you weren’t able to make AWP (or even if you picked up a starter pack there, but want more to share), here is your chance: we’ll be giving away bundles of 5 poetry starter packs—some to keep, and some to share—to each of the first ten (10) people to enter!

To help get you thinking, we thought we’d ask some of our Issue 5 contributors what Asian American poets they’ve been reading or whose work they’d recommend to others this month. Here’s what a couple of them said.

From Ching-In Chen:

 I adore Larissa Lai’s Eggs in the Basement because she generated/mutated the whole body of language/the story from the actual language that she is playing with: “I generated a body of source text in a ten-minute automatic exercise, separated it as neatly as possible into subjects and predicates and wrote the poem by repeating first all the subjects and and cycling through the predicates in the first half, and then reversing the procedure for the second. Strangely, the result is loosely the story of Freud’s Moses and Monotheism, in which two murders are committed by a collective: an initial one, which traumatizes the collective, and a second, which covers over the first and consolidates an violent and violated melancholy from which the group cannot escape.”  Next on my reading list is Paolo Javier’s The Feeling is Actual.  I witnessed Paolo’s live film narration of “Monty and Turtle,” on the Feminism Meets Neo-Benshi: Movietelling Talks Back panel at AWP recently, which explores the story of an Asian American artist couple, and loved what I saw!  After some discussion about the question about appropriation within neo/benshi practice, Paolo said that he dealt with this question by creating his own film clips to narrate to.  Though the film clips aren’t part of the book, his script is published in this book.

From Desmond Kon:

For a lecture I’m giving, I’m rereading Word of Mouth: An Anthology of Gay American Poetry, edited by Timothy Liu and published by Talisman House in 2000. In my research, I discovered Liu’s lovely essay titled, “Making the Case for Asian-American Poetry”, on Poets.org. I also just received Iris A. Law’s chapbook of wildly intelligent poems: Periodicity. These are lyric gems, some persona poems, that thread the imagined voices of great women scientists like Marie Curie, Rachel Carson and Anna Atkins. Finally, to throw in some fiction, I’m reading Tash Aw’s newest novel, Five Star Billionaire. The book intertwines the lives of migrant Malaysian workers, trying to eke out a living in Shanghai – this “Paris of the East” is at once bright lights and dog-eat-dog. In fact, Tash Aw is doing a reading at this awesome and intimate bookstore BooksActually, and I’m really looking forward to hearing him talk about the writing of his novel.

Our National Poetry Month giveaway will end at 11:59 PM EST on Monday, April 22nd. Winners will be announced the following week. Many thanks to our partners, Kaya Press and AALR, for their generous sponsorship, as well as to LR staff writer Henry Leung for donating a copy of his chapbook. We look forward to hearing from you, and hope that the comments that others leave in this thread will inspire you to read more Asian American poetry this April!

Best,

Iris & Mia

LR News: Issue 5 (The Hybridity Issue) is Here!

LR Issue 5
LR 5: The Hybridity Issue

At long last, the fifth issue of Lantern Review is now live! (And our site has been given a long-overdue face lift to match). Themed around the topic of “hybridity,” Issue 5 features 100 pages of content, including poetry by Desmond Kon Zhicheng-Mingdé, Amy Uyematsu, Sally Wen Mao, Esther Lee, Christopher Santiago, Khaty Xiong, Kristen Eliason, Jane Wong, Carrie Green, and Ching-In Chen; visual art by Karen An-Hwei Lee and Michael Marcinek; and a special feature on the work of Takeo Rivera, in which we interview the poet/playwright/scholar and present an excerpt of his choreopoem Prometheus Nguyen. Our very first themed issue, and perhaps our most challenging to put together to date, Issue 5 has been a long time in coming, but we think it’s been more than worth the wait, and we’re confident that you’ll feel the same.

To enter the issue, click here or on the cover image at the top of this post. We’d love to hear what you think about this new, thematic format, as well as our transition to a more streamlined, Google-Fonts-based design for both the site and the magazine. And of course, if you experience any technical issues while browsing, please don’t hesitate to let us know that, either. Drop us a line at editors [at] lanternreview.com at any time; we’re always grateful for your feedback.

A very happy Monday (of AWP week!) to you, and many thanks again for your continued support of Lantern Review.

Peace and Light,

Iris & Mia
LR Editors