The Ocean State Review

11/15/2024

Margot Singer, featured in the new Ocean State Review!

She got out of bed and went over to the window. The old wooden frame was drafty, the panes opaque with frost. A polar vortex, the weatherman had called it. On the map, a magenta swirl stretched down from the Arctic like a giant hand. She breathed a hole. The street below was silent. The sky was pock...

11/13/2024

Philadelphia Poets reading this Saturday!

11/04/2024

SHENA MCAULIFFE, FEATURED IN THE NEW OCEAN STATE REVIEW!

It was a tricycle, abandoned in some weeds along the river, that prompted this story. In my first draft, I began with section 2, the theft of the trike, and concluded with section 1, the chronological beginning of the tricycle’s history and the saddest of the three sections. I suppose the current ...

11/04/2024

FOUR POEMS BY ROSEMARY CAPPELLO, FEATURED IN THE NEW OCEAN STATE REVIEW!

My mother, the poet, Rosemary Cappello, believed in the power of literary journals, and of poetry, to change the world. Of course she was a lover of books, inveterately so, but she reserved a special place on her shelves for literary journals where many voices, many moods commingle; where micro-comm...

11/04/2024

A REVIEW OF WAYNE CRESSER’S THE BOOK OF NORMAN

In “Happiness is a Warm Gun (Summer 1969),” Norman and his brother Murray are learning the ropes of marksmanship at a Boy Scout camp with Tiger Darling, a former Marine, providing instruction. The power dynamic on the shooting range plays as imagined with macho tension provided by Tiger sporting...

10/25/2024

POETRY - What S*x Is Death?
Dario Bellezza
Selected and translated by Peter Covino

February 2025
Paper $18.95
ISBN 9780299350345
https://uwpress.wisc.edu/books/images-pk/F24/Bellezza_WhatS*xIsDeath-c.jpg

10/09/2024

Simon Anton Niño Diego Baena, featured in the new Ocean State Review!

Ever since my father handed Neruda's Isla Negra, he has been one of my favorite poets. This used to be a much longer poem, then I started revising it for more than a month. You just can't avoid mentioning Neruda's romantic-erotic tendencies that are prevalent in his oeuvre, hence the poem's last 4 s...

10/09/2024

Matthew Schmidt, featured in the new Ocean State Review!

The poem is not ekphrastic in nature. Instead, I wondered what it’d be like to call a poem after a made-up work of art, to pose as ekphrasis without actually being said. At the time I wrote the first draft of this poem in December 2016, I’d been seeing lots of poems beginning with ‘Landscape.....

09/21/2024

Pamela Alexander, in the new Ocean State Review!

The desert is deeper than I thought, deeper than thought, that trickster, bait- and-switcher, rabbit snare.

09/21/2024

Carolyn Oliver, in the new Ocean State Review!

Lately I’ve been feverish, prickly hot and sleepless. None of this work feels like

09/16/2024

Jodie Noel Vinson, in the new Ocean State Review!

34. It seems I stand there now, that I’ll continue to stand, long after all has been demolished. Can you see me, erect in the doorframe, white smock over dusky dress—fastened by ribbons, ornamented with crucifix and pocket watch—dark hair parted, perpetually awaiting my students?

09/06/2024

A Review of Kevin McLellan's Sky. Pond. Mouth., at the Ocean State Review!

While playing with the form and dispensing his poetic wit, Kevin creates an ecosystem of thought and image, commentary and memory. Over seven pages the first part’s final poem, “Narrative,” includes couplets with passages erased in strikethrough font, section and column breaks, lineated lines ...