Welcome to “Radius,” an online literary journal in blog format dedicated to poetry: How poetry works, how one poem or body of poems connects to another, how poetry exists in the world. We’re big believers around here that poetry doesn’t exist in a vacuum, and that it has a role to play in life, politics and culture.
Radius publishes in blog format, releasing a handful of poems and pieces of prose a week, and is probably best followed by being added to your blog reader of choice, such as Google Reader, or by subscribing to its Facebook community or Twitter feed to be kept abreast of the latest posts. Really, it’s a literary journal that’s designed to come to you.
THE EDITORS:
VICTOR D. INFANTE (editor-in-chief) is an award-winning poet and journalist living in Worcester, MA. His poems have appeared in dozens of newspapers, magazines, journals and anthologies internationally, and his first full-length collection of poems, City of Insomnia, is available from Write Bloody Publishing. He doesn’t like it when people tell him things can’t be done.
LEA C. DESCHENES (editor) received her MFA in Poetry from New England College. She has been a recipient of Worcester’s Jacob Knight Award, has been nominated for two Pushcart Prizes & once found a five-leaf clover during a solar eclipse. Her first full-length collection, The Constant Velocity of Trains, received honorable mention from the DIY Book Convention Awards and is available from Write Bloody Publishing. She is the co-editor of the anthology Knocking at the Door: Poems for Approaching the Other, published by Birch Bench Press.
TARA BETTS (poetry editor) teaches creative writing at Rutgers University. She is the author of Arc & Hue from Aquarius Press. Her work has appeared in Gathering Ground, Home Girls Make Some Noise, Hurricane Blues, Letters to the World: Poems from the Wom-Po Listserv and ROLE CALL. Her work has also been adapted for Steppenwolf Theatre production Words on Fire and Fingernails Across the Chalkboard – an anthology and play talking about the impact of AIDS and HIV in the Black community. She is a Cave Canem fellow and an graduate of the New England College MFA Program.
HEATHER SOMMER (poetry editor) earned her BA in English: Creative Writing from the University of Wisconsin-Eau Claire. She begins the University of Iowa Writers’ Workshop MFA in Poetry program this fall. Her poetry has been published in None of the Above and her comic short, Gramma Dee, is available from Ronin Studios in the anthology Hope: HERO Initiative. Her preferred genres are contemporary free-verse poetry, graphic novels, short/experimental fiction, and whiskey-induced napkin-doodles. She hates Dr. Pepper, tomato sauce, writing in pencil, and numbers.
CARLYE ARCHIBEQUE (reviews editor) made her mark as a journalist beginning as the reviews editor for Next … Magazine, the popular Orange Country based poetry magazine that morphed into the online zine, Southern California Poetix where she currently writes a regular column titled Poetry Matters and is the editor of the LA Poetry Events page. Ms. Archibeque is the publisher/editor of the online magazine, The Independent Reviews Site, which reviews the content and interviews the creators of underground, cult and independently produced music, literature, comics, movies and events. In her time on Earth she’s held many jobs that provided inspiration for a career in writing: weapons and tactics trainer for the Navy Seabees, casino waitress, fry cook, postal carrier and visual effects coordinator for Spider-Man 2, to name a few. Her poetry has been anthologized widely with work appearing in: Blue Satellite, Black Cross, DiverseCity: The Austin International Poetry Anthology, Pearl, Social Anarchism, So Luminous the Wildflowers: An Anthology of California Writers, Scream While You Burn: A Caffeine Anthology, and Spillway. She is the author of three chapbooks: Why I Shop (Nightgaunt Press); Dry Goods (Laguna Poets Series); and Live at the Cobalt (Cassowary Press). She is two units shy of a BA degree in Sociology from the University of California at Los Angeles and will get to it when she has time.
GUIDING PRINCIPLES:
“Judging a work of art is virtually the same mental operation as judging human beings, and requires the same aptitudes: first, a real love of works of art … an inclination to praise rather than blame, and regret when a complete rejection is required; second, a vast experience of all artistic activities; and last, an awareness, openly and happily accepted, of one’s own prejudices. Some critics fail because they are pedants whose ideal of perfection is always offended by a concrete realization. Others fail because they are insular and hostile to what is alien to them; these critics, yielding to their prejudices without knowing they have them and sincerely offering judgments they believe to be objective, are more excusable than those who, aware of their prejudices, lack the courage to enter the lists to defend their personal tastes.” – W.H. Auden
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