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Contrary Magazine

Fourteen New Poems, Four New Stories For Spring

Janet McNally’s poems captivated us—viscerally—from the first lines, not just the imagery, but the sounds: “kick past coral,” “conch shells,” “plate glass.” As we read on, we entered a web of thematic strings that tie the poems together: flower petals, pomegranates, rubies, shades of red, myth, and fairy tale. These poems are so beautifully interwoven, [...]

Aerogram! The Summer Issue Is Out!

Please do yourself a favor and read “Aerograms” by Jim Krosschell:   I come into the teachers’ room from a class, and the sky-blue aerogram is peeking out of my letter box. I take it to my desk and sit down in my chair. We wait a moment, letter and I, objects of wonder and furtive curiosity [...]

What it Means to be Contrary

“Turning words into art is unnatural. It begins with a contrary attitude. It says, I am unhappy with the way things are and desire to make things different. Rather than represent the world, I will make something wildly and savagely new. I will defy logic. I will invest in new perceptions. I will combine and [...]

New Issue and Summer Call

In “The Nervous Writer,” MFA student S.W. Flores satirizes workshop culture at its less-than-optimum. In “The Church of Poetry,” poet Dane Cervine laments poetry’s doctrinal disputes. These works bookend the Winter and Spring 2014 issues of Contrary, awaiting your eyes at contrarymagazine.com. With new poems by Weston Cutter, Samuel Hovda, Okla Elliott, Hannah Dow, Jesse Mikhail Wesso, and Anne Whitehouse. Fresh fiction by Heather [...]

A New Video from Nicelle Davis and Cheryl Gross

Nicelle Davis is working on a new project, and fortunately for all of us, that means a new video collaboration with illustrator Cheryl Gross. You can watch the video on our little screen in the upper-right hand corner of Contrary Blog. Here’s more on the collaboration: Illustrator Cheryl Gross and poet Nicelle Davis create a grotesque peep-show [...]

Contrary Turns Ten

For Contrary’s Tenth Anniversary, the editors compiled top-ten lists of the best works of poetry, fiction, and commentary we’ve published since the magazine’s debut in Autumn 2003. But of course, these lists could never be complete—or even correct. What have we left out? If you have  favorites that you’ve read in Contrary, please let us [...]

Ten Years = 130 Moons

The summer issue of Contrary is out, topped by three moon poems by John A. Nieves, and we are now accepting submissions for Winter 2014. The deadline is Dec. 1. Our Autumn 2013 issue will mark our tenth anniversary and will be devoted to the best fiction, poetry, commentary and the most contrary contrarians we have encountered since [...]

Contrary Has Sprung

The Spring 2013 issue of Contrary features new prose by Jennifer Givhan—a prose poem and two stories. The rising Albuquerque writer is the author of the poetry collection Red Sun Mother and the novel manuscript In The Time of Jubilee. We also have new poems by Vincent Joseph Noto, Mark Goad, Megan Alpert, and Bill Yarrow. New fiction [...]

This Is Why We Do This Thing

Karina Borowicz sends word that her first collection of poetry, The Bees Are Waiting, which already had been selected by Franz Wright for the Marick Press Poetry Prize, has just been named a Must-Read Book of 2013 by the Massachusetts Center for the Book. Karina’s debut publication, the Maintenance of Public Order, appeared in Contrary in [...]

Pregnant with Stories and Poems

If you haven’t heard, we published a mega-issue of Contrary this winter, with seven new short stories, led by Nahid Rachlin and Jennifer Givhan, and eight new poems including a trio by Amanda Leigh Rogers. If you received an email from us telling you an invitation to submit was on its way, or even if [...]

Writers, Accomplished and New, for Summer

The summer issue of Contrary Magazine features poet Anne Barngrover, who holds an MFA from Florida State and will be a PhD candidate in Poetry at the University of Missouri this fall. “Anne Barngrover’s poems inhabit the rural south with a devout specificity to detail. It is our pleasure to share them with you…” ~ Poetry Editor [...]

Spring at the End of the World

It’s the season of planting, and “Need Somebody to Love,” by our Spring 2012 featured poet, Ronda Broatch, begins under the skin: I’ve picked each fruit under strawberry leaves planted my Queen of the Night and now this sliver of bark won’t budge for love, nor money, nor squeeze of tweezers, like the stinger left [...]

Rafael Torch, 1975-2011

Rafael Torch’s work in Contrary: Ebb and Flow: Part Two. The End. No More. Finis. by RAFAEL TORCH on JULY 13, 2011 I sit on my hotel bed and say some kind of prayer, an eight word utterance I’ve imagined seemingly out of nowhere in the last few days in order to keep at bay the worst I [...]