The literary magazine, 2River, is listed with both Poets and Writers and New Pages.com Literary Magazine Listings. and has been publishing four times a year since 1996. The magazine now includes poetry chapbooks and multi-media presentations of poetry completely archived and available online. Email submissions are accepted but simultaneous submissions are discouraged and if you’ve been hoping to get your work ‘out there’ on a blog or personal website then don’t bother submitting it here, 2River wants only unpublished work.
Many chapbooks feature artistic covers and a number are available for listening to as an audio file. Detailed attention to meter and form prevail through the works. Precision and attention to the containment of the poem leave little room for whimsical meanderings. One example is Peter Weltner’s poem “Clothes like a dove” which consists of seven sections of ten line stanzas, each neatly tucked and broken at nearly the same length with little variation.
2River seems to favor strongly thematic, unified, and cohesive work in which it is easy to match the poet with the poem such as in the chapbook,“Color Field,” by Mark Cunningham. The chapbook is composed of thirteen prose poems aptly named after individual colors. Each poem breaks free in looser associations within their form using the color as a starting block, a configuration of premeditated thought.
In Christien Gholson’s chapbook, “How the world was made,” Gholson gracefully leaps from working in factories and taking smokebreaks to girls selling pamphlets in a casual conversational tone of the speaker, I kept her talking because I/wanted her to stay the night. She wasn’t bad looking. I imagined her/ standing next to the bed, streetlight falling across her naked body. She knew what I was doing but she was tired from walking to door all/day, so played along. Only two lines later he has brought the reader to a much less comfortable place of murder, though not that of the expected girl selling pamphlets as a victim. Gholson continues in his stark and bleak frankness in the poem “Patterns.” Some tell the future by examining entrails. Examining what’s in the/stomach will tell you something about the land around you. With complete surprising yet congruent shifts he moves the poem forward. Something’s been circling over the river these past few nights. It’s no bird. And maybe in summation is the line from “I dreamed I saw Joe Hill last night,” I am the last. I am writing a poem tracing the genealogy of the garbage I/ collect. I am stealing back everything that has been stolen from me.
While 2River describes itself as “preferring poems with image, subtlety, and point of view, a surface of worldly exactitude, as well as depth of semantic ambiguity; and a voice that negotiates with its body of predecessors,” I found that they are also open to the plain and honest voice that isn’t always so subtle. But if you want to be published here you should heed their advice overall regarding the quality of work.
Many chapbooks feature artistic covers and a number are available for listening to as an audio file. Detailed attention to meter and form prevail through the works. Precision and attention to the containment of the poem leave little room for whimsical meanderings. One example is Peter Weltner’s poem “Clothes like a dove” which consists of seven sections of ten line stanzas, each neatly tucked and broken at nearly the same length with little variation.
2River seems to favor strongly thematic, unified, and cohesive work in which it is easy to match the poet with the poem such as in the chapbook,“Color Field,” by Mark Cunningham. The chapbook is composed of thirteen prose poems aptly named after individual colors. Each poem breaks free in looser associations within their form using the color as a starting block, a configuration of premeditated thought.
In Christien Gholson’s chapbook, “How the world was made,” Gholson gracefully leaps from working in factories and taking smokebreaks to girls selling pamphlets in a casual conversational tone of the speaker, I kept her talking because I/wanted her to stay the night. She wasn’t bad looking. I imagined her/ standing next to the bed, streetlight falling across her naked body. She knew what I was doing but she was tired from walking to door all/day, so played along. Only two lines later he has brought the reader to a much less comfortable place of murder, though not that of the expected girl selling pamphlets as a victim. Gholson continues in his stark and bleak frankness in the poem “Patterns.” Some tell the future by examining entrails. Examining what’s in the/stomach will tell you something about the land around you. With complete surprising yet congruent shifts he moves the poem forward. Something’s been circling over the river these past few nights. It’s no bird. And maybe in summation is the line from “I dreamed I saw Joe Hill last night,” I am the last. I am writing a poem tracing the genealogy of the garbage I/ collect. I am stealing back everything that has been stolen from me.
While 2River describes itself as “preferring poems with image, subtlety, and point of view, a surface of worldly exactitude, as well as depth of semantic ambiguity; and a voice that negotiates with its body of predecessors,” I found that they are also open to the plain and honest voice that isn’t always so subtle. But if you want to be published here you should heed their advice overall regarding the quality of work.
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