Galileo Press and Free State Review

Free State Review THE MUSICAL! --poem meets story, poem loses story, poem is chased by a chorus of essays, story is just, "Oof, my sucky life."

The Cranberries - Zombie (Official Music Video) YouTube video by TheCranberriesVEVO

Would be so crazy to write a haunting song about the human toll of your war-torn region all for Americans to be like “Halloween playlist lols”

m.youtube.com/watch?v=6Ejg...

wish we could flip the business model and get paid for writing but then we did editing for free, or payment in copies

T. R. Poulson is in the bubbler--https://freestatereview.com/2025/12/09/fifteen-hundred-ladybugs/

just requested this book

Poets, We Need to Talk About Self-Promotion Why asking for support feels harder than writing the book

Poets aren’t bad at self-promotion because we’re inherently humble, but because the habits that sustain poetry have very little to do with the habits required to promote it. Promotion can feel like an assault on the inner world by the outer one.

Remember that Chris Toll poetry zine Strangled by a Cardigan Sweater?

"A repeated phrase serves as a variable to connect two non-adjacent ideas." (Michael Dean)

New interview with Galileo Press author Emily May
www.hobartpulp.com/web_features...

Review of The Only Woman in the Room, by Marie Benedict This historical novel retells the story of the 40’s screen actress Hedy Lamarr, born Hedwig Kiesler, an Austrian Jew living in Vienna during the years preceding WWII.

The story is fascinating, but the prose is somewhat transparent and overwrought in places. The writing is definitely a means to an end but not an end in itself. The book is not about the way it is told, but what is told...
juliawendell.substack.com/p/review-of-...

If you're one of our authors and are planning a transition please let us know so we can change your name and gender in your online bio.

We don't need no point of view. We don't need no tense control. No dark star chasm in the class room...

Something is beginning to worry me about how we refer to The Speaker in a poem. It puts words on a higher level than action, or motion. I wish we could call her The Mover. The Doer. The Engager.

"I had a dream with symbolism so transparent that it makes me want to write a scathing review of my own unconscious." (Robin Meyer, poet, translator)

Crane's 1895 Red Badge book is a good example of cinematic writing (when descriptive nouns become sentient), but before there was actual cinema:

"The cold passed reluctantly from the earth, and the retiring fogs revealed an army stretched out on the hills, resting."

Lights. Camera. Inaction.

Characters are people.
They do shit for no reason.
Not everything they do has to be explained.
(Jessica Bonder)

"The world is a kind of spiritual kindergarten, where millions of bewildered infants are trying to spell God with the wrong blocks.” Edwin Arlington Robinson

Plot points are not plot

I like to know whether someone is the kind of person who eats broccoli before I knew whether she's been to hell and back. A teaspoon of portraiture, all I'm saying.

A sonnet is only the expectation of a sonnet, whether or not a sonnet 'actually' happens.

Not sure about people who say, "That's hilarious," instead of actually laughing. That's what we want in your poems, actual out loud laughing and singing. Come rave with us.

Is that a single line or is it a half-couplet?

A Review of David Dodd Lee’s The Bay – by C. I. Marshall David Dodd Lee’s The Bay dazzles with clarity, humor, and lyric depth—poems of swine, goldfinches, memory, ads, and aging that remind us to notice everything.

C. I. Marshall reviews Davide Dodd Lee's The Bay, out from @broadstone16.bsky.social
freestatereview.com/2025/09/03/a...

All my poems are about you. The "I" is just a mask.

If you're a right handed poet try writing a poem with your left hand now and then just to use the other side of your head.

A coffin lined with memory foam. That too much to ask of a poem?

Always hearing in workshops that an author should trust the reader but I never hear how readers need to trust the author.

“She was so tired of the old way of telling stories, all those too worn narrative paths, the familiar plot thickets, the fat social novels. She needed something messier, something sharper, something like a bomb going off.” Lauren Groff, Fates and Furies, but also what we're looking for.

Actually take all these turns and swerves somewhere or it's just a merry go round