Friday Links
May 9, 2025
Our Easter Issue is Here!
Habemus Papem! Pope Leo XIV
Poetry & Mysticism in Maritain, Mistral, and Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz
New Verse Review 2.2: Poets of the University of St. Thomas, Spring 2025 Mini-Issue
Generative Joy Workshop with Shemaiah Gonzalez
Why It’s So Hard To Find Small Press Books
Our Easter Issue is Here!
We are pleased to bring you our latest issue: Easter 2025. This issue features “The Off Season” by Ennis James Sheehan, “The Tower” by Daniel Massett, and “Cardinal little king of winter” by J.C. Scharl.
Habemus Papem! Pope Leo XIV
We’ve got a new pope, as we all know. It was fascinating to see just how much attention this received on the news and on social media. The Catholic Church is supposedly irrelevant, yet, there were Pope Brackets. I was picking up my niece from school and listening to the radio. The DJ mentioned the brackets, then said, “But, seriously, I’m not Catholic, but this is a holy thing, picking a new pope.” It was a country music station, but still…
Lots of hot takes on the new pope, whether he is “conservative” or “progressive,” a Francis II or something else. One famous priest immediately took to Twitter to make one of his little pronouncements about what kind of man and priest this pope is—heavy on the “nice” adjectives and pretty vague on actual details, a bit like those “Happy Birthday to our brave, fearless, funny, etc, etc kid” posts you see on FB. Sometimes they describe the kid perfectly, sometimes, not so much. I’m not sure the hot takes and predictions amount to much—we’ll see. In the meantime, though, this is a good time to re-read some of his predecessor’s encyclicals: Rerum Novarum and Testem Benevolentiae Nostrae are good places to start.
Poetry & Mysticism in Maritain, Mistral, and Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz
Early bird registration ends today. For more info and to register, please go HERE:
For the first time ever, the Global Catholic Literature series will ponder the paradoxes of poetry in Poetry & Mysticism in Maritain, Mistral, and Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz. Centuries before Latin America became known as the land of magical realism, she gave birth to the mysticism of St. Rose of Lima and the poetry of Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz, the “Phoenix of the Americas,” whose poems about love and loss, the toils of women and the experience of God inspired generations of Latin American poets. Foremost among Sor Juana’s literary daughters was Gabriela Mistral, the Chilean poet and Nobel laureate deemed "the spiritual queen of all Latin America" by the Nobel Committee. Bearing all the marks of a mystic, Mistral grew from a young girl "deep in conversation with the birds and flowers of the garden" to a disconsolate young woman who "like Job...cried aloud to the skies." Formed by these experiences, Mistral's poems strike mystic chords and mournful strains.
New Verse Review 2.2: Poets of the University of St. Thomas, Spring 2025 Mini-Issue
There’s a new mini-issue of NVR out this week with poems from students in the UST MFA program. I highly recommend you take a look as this issue includes many friends of ours, and even a DT editor or two. Be sure to check out DT’s Christopher Honey with his excellent poem, “Pontiac Sunbird, 1994.”
Generative Joy Workshop with Shemaiah Gonzalez
In this generative workshop you’ll look at work from three joyful writers and begin three pieces yourself. The workshop is on Saturday June 7 10am -noon PST. Follow the link above to register.
Why It’s So Hard To Find Small Press Books
Melanie Jennings and Elizabeth Kaye Cook follow up on an essay they wrote last year, both for the Substack Persuasion, on publishing:
In December, we wrote an essay about how small presses still fight the good fight for risky literary fiction, even as the conglomerated Big Five publishers abandon it. In a time when companies like Meta steal books to build generative AI, then claim that individual books “are no different from noise” in terms of their contribution to AI, defending wild fiction matters more than ever. Many readers reached out to us: after too-often plunking down $30 for a well-reviewed but ultimately disappointing new release, they were clamoring for better options. If small and independent presses offered fresher, more challenging books, how could they find and read them?
