Review of The Iowa Review

I may have already posted this and just not able to find it... but as I was reading through everyone else's posts I couldn't find mine which I originally posted on Sunday, so I'm sorry if this is the second time this is posted!

I decided to write about The Iowa Review as my choice of a literary journal because of a short essay that I read from Mary Oliver’s Best American Essay’s of 2009. The essay that I read was called The Dark Art of Description by Patricia Hampl and after reading this essay I knew that The Iowa Review was the journal I wanted to focus on. The essay was fresh, smart and extremely well written and definitely the sort of essay that I would want to read more of. I googled The Iowa review and found it listed as number 18 on the list of top 50 literary magazines. On The Iowa Review’s own website much about the goals of their journal can be understood and through reading about what the journal states about itself, you can begin to understand what to expect from reading it. “Although you may find writers already familiar to you in most of our issues, you will surely find others who are not. Discovering a new and compelling writer, one we'd never heard of before but whose writing comes through to us—that still seems the magic of our work.” After reading this in their description I realized that this is the kind of literary magazine I was looking for and I was excited to get my hands on a copy. I was pleased to find that The Iowa Review is carried in ODY but you can also receive a year’s subscription if you submit a piece of work for the yearly IOWA REVIEW AWARDS, which has a $20 entrance fee. The cover of the most recent issue has a map of, you guessed it: Iowa, on the cover, which apparently is part of another poster. The journal is published seasonally and in the most recent Fall 2009 issue there are 34 entries including poetry, fiction and short essays. Many of the entries that I read I was completely satisfied with as they were nearly everything I could have hoped and expected to read however I was somewhat surprised to find that there were a few entries that I didn’t really like at all and couldn’t really understand why they would have been published over the hundreds of other entries that I’m sure were denied. I thought about this and then realized that many of the things I did actually like were probably denied from many places as well and the entries that I wasn’t quite as found of were appreciated of by the editors by reasons that I probably was not ready to appreciate and I’m truly looking forward to when I can be able to appreciate them however I’m sure that in many cases there are sometimes things that people simply like or don’t like just because of personal preference. One specially featured poem that I particularly liked was called Northern Pike which was written by Felda Brown. The poem has 38 lines and I think only three of those lines are end-stopped including the last line. The poem is about who I think is a brother figure of the speaker in the poem and about an experience that he has while fishing. Some of the turns of phrase that she uses are really great and personal and so I really enjoyed the poem. The poem is great and I recommend reading it if you can find it. I looked to see if you could find it online but I instead came upon a whole slew of other poems published by Felda Brown, which shows that she’s a pretty well written poet. I think that this is another aspect that I enjoyed from this assignment is that not only does reading a journal give you some perspective on the type of stuff that is being published today but it also introduces you to writers that you may want to look into reading more of in the future. Overall I think that The Iowa Review is a great literary journal and that anyone would be honored to be published in it!