Literary review magazines
A literary review magazine is a periodical that combines criticism, essays and published works in the same issue, and River & Sound Review is one such journal: an independent literary review magazine that publishes 12 poems in each of its 2 quarterly issues, alongside reviews and criticism, in a 64 page format. The page you are reading is the index of those poems, organized issue by issue since the journal's first issue in 2019, so you can browse every poem the journal has published without leaving the site. The index sits on this page because a review magazine's poems are only half of what it is; the other half is the criticism that surrounds them, and the two belong together.
River & Sound Review publishes 3 issues per year, which is 1 more issue per year than the 2 quarterly issues of a standard quarterly. Each issue holds a poetry section of 12 poems, a review section of 4 reviews, and an essay section of 2 essays, and the masthead carries 5 names: the editor, the managing editor, the poetry editor, the reviews editor and the production editor. The masthead has held the same 5 roles since issue 1, and the same editors have held 4 of them since 2021.
The poems published in River & Sound Review, issue by issue
The poems published in River & Sound Review span 8 issues so far, and the table below lists the title, the poet and the length of each poem, starting with issue 1 from 2019.
| Issue | Year | Poem title | By | Lines |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | 2019 | Low Water at the Ford | H. Okafor | 22 |
| 1 | 2019 | What the Ferry Keeps | M. Reyes | 31 |
| 2 | 2019 | Gravel Road Elegy | D. Lindqvist | 18 |
| 2 | 2019 | Second Current | T. Abara | 40 |
| 3 | 2020 | Houseboat Ledger | S. Whitcombe | 26 |
| 3 | 2020 | What the Dam Asked | P. Nkemdirim | 35 |
| 4 | 2020 | Bridge Notes, 1998 | L. Fontaine | 20 |
| 4 | 2020 | Reading the Flood Marks | J. Osei | 44 |
| 5 | 2021 | Winter Pool | K. Halvorsen | 17 |
| 5 | 2021 | The River's Own Accounting | A. Mbadi | 33 |
| 6 | 2022 | Tide Table | R. Calloway | 24 |
| 6 | 2022 | What the Levee Forgets | N. Petrova | 38 |
| 7 | 2023 | Spring Flood, Late | E. Brandt | 21 |
| 7 | 2023 | Two Currents, One Bank | G. Adeyemi | 29 |
| 8 | 2024 | Delta Arithmetic | C. Marchetti | 27 |
| 8 | 2024 | The Sound the River Makes When It Is Measured | B. Osei | 52 |
That is 16 poems across the 8 issues, and the index will grow by 2 poems per issue going forward, since 12 poems per issue is a section length the journal has kept since 2019 and the index above tracks every poem in that running total.
Where a poem fits in a review magazine
A poem fits into a review magazine as the creative half of a journal that is built around its criticism. In a pure poetry journal, every page is a poem, and the reader who wants critical context has to leave the issue for it. In a review magazine such as River & Sound Review, the 12 poems of an issue share the table of contents with 4 reviews and 2 essays, so the creative work and the criticism of creative work travel in the same 64 pages. That pairing is the whole reason a poetry editor reads a submission twice: once for the poem itself, and once for the question of where it sits in a journal that also reviews books.
- Poetry in Literary Magazines, in a review magazine, carries a criticism column on the same page as the poem it reviews
- A pure poetry journal carries 10 to 16 poems per issue and no reviews at all
- A literary magazine of the mixed kind carries 12 poems, 4 reviews and 2 essays per issue, as River & Sound Review does
- A review magazine that is quarterly issues 2 issues per year, while the 3 issues per year of River & Sound Review adds 1 more issue than that
The 5 editors on the masthead split this work, since the poetry editor reads the 12 poems, the reviews editor reads the 4 reviews, and the editor reads the 2 essays, so no single pair of hands reads all 18 works in an issue.
Literary magazines like the Paris Review
Literary magazines like the Paris Review are the large, national magazines that set the pace for smaller journals, and the comparison helps a reader place River & Sound Review on the same shelf. The Paris Review is a monthly that has run since 1953, which makes it 71 years older than the 2 quarterly issues per year of a young quarterly, and its 24 issues per year are 21 more than the 3 issues per year of River & Sound Review. Its model is the long interview plus the short fiction and the poems, and a review section that has reviewed the year's fiction and poetry for 71 years.
| Journal | Founded | Issues per year | Poems per issue | Model |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| The Paris Review | 1953 | 4 | 20 | Interviews, fiction and poetry with a review section |
| Bell's Review of Books | 2007 | 6 | 10 | Books reviewed, fiction and poetry alongside the criticism |
| River & Sound Review | 2019 | 3 | 12 | 12 poems, 4 reviews and 2 essays per 64 page issue |
The table shows 3 journals on one scale, and the scale runs from 24 issues per year of the monthly to 3 issues per year of the small quarterly, which is the range in which most of the most prestigious literary magazines in English sit, from the large monthly to the regional quarterly.
Bellevue Literary Review on the Submission Grinder
Bellevue Literary Review on the Submission Grinder is a data point about one journal's submissions, read on the submission tracking site where the journal has published its acceptance statistics for 3 years. The site's entry for Bellevue Literary Review reports a 100 submission rate per year against 4 accepted poems per year, which works out to 25 accepted poems per year, or about 1 accepted poem per 12 poems submitted. A reviewer of that row should read it the way the site presents it: as a ratio, not as a promise, since the site has shown that the same journal can run 100 submissions per year for 1 year and 50 the next.
The same site lists 217 other literary magazines and journals, and 46 of those 217 are marked as accepting submissions for poetry at the time of the last update. A reader comparing the 217 rows will notice that the 5 most prestigious entries on the list are the ones with the longest waits, and the 5 shortest waits belong to the small regional journals that publish 2 or 3 issues per year.
Tahoma Literary Review on the Submission Grinder
Tahoma Literary Review on the Submission Grinder is a second row in the same table, and it reads differently from the Bellevue row because it is a 2 issue per year journal. The site's entry for Tahoma Literary Review reports a 25 submission rate per year against 2 accepted poems per year, which works out to 1 accepted poem per 12 poems submitted, the same 25 to 4 ratio as the Bellevue row, and the same 25 to 4 ratio holds across 20 of the 217 rows the site lists, which is why a 1 in 12 acceptance is the median, not the best case, for a poem read by a literary magazine.
The 2 rows together answer the question a reader arrives with: if a poem in River & Sound Review took 4 weeks to reach an acceptance, that 4 weeks sits at the fast end of the 12 to 16 weeks that the 217 rows on the site average, and the 5 editors on the masthead keep that 4 week pace by reading 12 poems a week across the 3 issues per year.
Where the 217 journals stand, and what a reader does with the list
The 217 journals stand in 3 tiers when you sort the Submission Grinder rows by prestige and by wait time, and the sort is the only one that holds across both columns. The top tier holds 12 journals, and it is the tier a reader names when they ask for the most prestigious literary magazines, from the 71 year old monthly to the long running quarterly. The middle tier holds 95 journals, and it is the tier where the 46 entries marked as accepting submissions cluster, since the middle tier reads 100 submissions per year as a median. The bottom tier holds 110 journals, and it is the tier where the 3 issues per year of a small review magazine sits, and where the 4 week acceptance of a poem in River & Sound Review comes from.
- The top tier of 12 journals, the most prestigious literary magazines, runs 4 to 24 issues per year
- The middle tier of 95 journals, the literary magazines and journals a poet submits to first, runs 2 to 4 issues per year
- The bottom tier of 110 journals, the small review magazines that read a poem in 4 weeks, runs 2 to 3 issues per year
- The 46 entries marked as accepting submissions sit in the middle tier, and the 5 most prestigious of the 46 sit in the top tier
A reader with a poem in hand uses the 3 tiers in order, and the order is the 12 journals of the top tier, then the 46 accepting entries of the middle tier, then the 110 small journals of the bottom tier, since the 1 in 12 acceptance of the median row is the same at every tier and the wait is shortest at the bottom tier.
Jobs in literary magazines run on the same 3 tiers, and the 5 masthead roles of River & Sound Review are the 5 roles that the bottom tier pays for, since the 2 to 3 issues per year of that tier needs 5 people and no more. The middle tier hires 12 people against its 95 journals, and the top tier hires 46 people against its 12 journals, which is why the 12 poems of a River & Sound Review issue are read by a poetry editor, not by a room, and why the 16 poems in the index above were read by 3 editors across the 8 issues, not by a single pair of hands.