Illuminations: An International Magazine of Contemporary Writing

03/07/2025

03/07/2025

After way too long a wait, I'm happy to say that I've picked up copies of the latest issue of Illuminations. It's a goodie -- but may, alas, be the last.
Cover design by Jason Hardesty, featuring a detail from one of Demond Melancon's amazing beadwork creations.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j1jGF-6bFpI

20/06/2025

Further delay on #40. Hoping now to start getting it into circulation first week of July. Sorry to keep everyone waiting.

10/06/2025

Inching closer to seeing _Illuminations_ 40 in print.
(Cover design courtesy of Jason Hardesty; image from beadwork by Demond Melancon [https://www.demondmelancon.com/])

30/09/2024

https://www.thirteenbridgesreview.com/
Thirteen Bridges Review, the literary magazine out of Auburn University in Alabama, is open for submissions.
(As is Illuminations, of course! https://illuminations.submittable.com/submit)

Check out AUM's online Literary Review. Look for Thirteen Bridges Review's upcoming print journal, coming soon!

25/06/2024

Here's my Editor's Note introducing the new issue of Illuminations:

Illuminations was first published in 1982 in Columbia, SC,
which means it’s been in existence for more than 40 years (even
though this issue is only #39). Much has changed over these last
four decades: the global political landscape has changed and
changed again, while our concept of writing has been revolutionized by technology more significantly than since Gutenberg.
With the potential for instant global transmission of any words
we care to tap out, little poetry magazines look less like dinosaurs than one of the myriad apparently insignificant species
that daily become extinct virtually without notice. Illuminations
is more like the Cheongpung Blind-Beetle (officially extinct in
the wild in 2023) than the pterodactyl.
Except that, like the poet in Holly Day’s opening poem of this
issue who hasn’t figured things out and given up, we’re still
here. And we’re still implicitly beating the same drum that
poets and poetry have been beating for millennia, leaving verbal
traces attesting to the preciousness of words in time. As W.H.
Auden famously wrote (and then attempted to cancel) in his
elegy to W.B. Yeats,
Time that is intolerant
Of the brave and innocent,
And indifferent in a week
To a beautiful physique,
Worships language and forgives
Everyone by whom it lives;
Pardons cowardice, conceit,
Lays its honors at their feet.
Thus, while so many of the poems in this issue address the
inevitable passage of time, in their craft, their beauty and their
brokenness, they also illustrate what Joseph Brodsky took from
Auden: that “if time . . . worships language, . . . then isn’t language a repository of time? And isn’t this why time worships it? And isn’t a song, or a poem, or indeed a speech itself, with
its caesuras, pauses, spondees, and so forth, a game language
plays to restructure time? And aren’t those by whom language
‘lives’ those by whom time does too?” In reading Auden’s lines,
Brodsky recognized “a poet who spoke the truth—or through
whom the truth made itself audible.” May the poems in this issue bring you similar moments of recognition, similar illuminations.

22/06/2024

Issue 39 of Illuminations is dedicated to translator-extraordinaire Louis Bourne (1942-2023).
Louis was a prolific translator of Spanish–language poetry into English. Among his many publications over a long and distinguished career, The Crackling Sun, translations of Nobel Prize–winner Vicente Aleixandre, appeared in 1977. For more than 30 years, Illuminations benefited enormously from Bourne’s expertise and his extensive connections with poets across the Spanish-speaking world—Spain, the Canary Islands, Latin America, and the Caribbean. The magazine first carried his work in the 1989 issue (a translation of Humberto Diaz Casanueva’s “The Child of Robben Island” as well as an original poem of his own) and very few issues subsequently did not carry at least one Spanish poet introduced to English-speaking readers by Louis Bourne.

21/06/2024

Issue 39 is finally here. Cover design features Natalie Daise's fabulous image "Saint Septima" honoring the "Mother of the Movement" Septima Poinsette Clark:

17/06/2024

There have been some delays with the printing of this year's Illuminations, but it should be out shortly. Contributors and subscribers should receive their copies before the end of next week. Apologies for the delay.

14/06/2024

Sorry it's taking so long to get Illuminations out this year. Publication is imminent. Thank you for your patience.