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Pond 68 - April 2022

Submissions Open
What’s outside the pond? The Pond. And what’s outside the Pond? The pond. Put another way - when I write a poem, so do you, and vice versa.  The thing to realize is that you and me ARE the Pond.

Be sure to grab a copy of the 2021 StC Anthology for that person in your life who isn’t into reading, poetry, and fiction. Spank the carp.

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- Ken
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[StC ad, not a Google ad]

POEM
Leslie Hodge - Christmas Tree

FLASH
Ken Poyner - Select Use

SHORT  STORY
Alan Brickman - The End of Dad

SHORT  STORY
Richard Goodwin - In Memory Of​

POEM
Lois Marie Harrod - The Ancestors

POEM
Christian Ward - Cabbage white butterfly

FLASH
Vidya Vasudevan - Come back

SHORT  STORY
Fabiola Werlang - In rags

Support the Carp...
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Friends of the Carp
American Life in Poetry
The Art of Elizabeth Darrow

National Steinbeck Center 
Barking Moose Press 
Six Questions For...
Pearl S. Buck International​
The Hemingway Society

Author Profile
Jimmy Banta
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Mind of a Poet
Leslie Hodge​
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Streets of San Fran...

ARTISTS and SHUTTERBUGS
I’m looking for original artwork and enhanced photos featuring Carp (including Koi) for the Carpwork Gallery. See the Submissions page for details.

Listed at Duotrope
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Authors' Row

Click on any image to order.
Kim Malinowski
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Home explores grief and belonging as Kim Malinowski writes with her own star-pen discovering that home is a process and that we carry it within us. We take home wherever we go and through whatever trials we face.
Terry Tierney
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Set in the Vietnam War era, Lucky Ride tells the story of a recent veteran, an unraveling marriage, and a hitchhiking trip steeped in hippie optimism, post-war skepticism, and drug-induced fantasy.
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“A bang-zoom road trip novel with the queasy high-flying pace of Easy Rider and the breakneck prose of On the Road” --Douglas Cole, author of The White Field.
Charles Springer
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Nowhere Now Here is a collection of prose poems that read and feel whimsical on the surface, with solid and brilliant imagery, but underneath this surface lay undercurrents of grit and pathos. It's a standout collection of ordinary lives and their seemingly ordinary moments made extraordinary.The collection has received many wonderful endorsements from the likes of David Keplinger, David Shumate, Gene Twaronite, Michael Martone, Barbara Henning, Rebecca Kinzie-Bastian and Matthew Lippman.  Available from the publisher, Radial Books
Cheryl J. Fish
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This unique collection of poems, The Sauna Is Full of Maids, by Cheryl J. Fish, reflects on how present-day Finnish life intertwines with folklore and mythology—celebrating sauna culture, travel and friendships over time. Accompanied by many of the poet’s own photographs, this collection has rich cultural detail ranging from karaoke pubs, environmental art, queer Helsinki, swimming halls, and saunas that could catch on fire.
Richard Sipe
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In his new book of poetry Richard Craig Sipe explores what happens in the aftermath of a life, a town, or a love. These are the LOVELY DREGS: what is left over, what remains, what is never the same, except that, somehow, oddly, it is.
 
LOVELY DREGS is available from Atmosphere Press
Karlo Sevilla
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Released in 2018 by Soma Publishing, this is the first full-length collection of poems from widely-published and award-winning poet Karlo Sevilla. Based in Quezon City, Philippines, his poems appear or are forthcoming in Philippines Graphic, DIAGRAM, Small Orange, Radius, Spank the Carp, Matter, Eclectica and other literary journals, anthologies and platforms worldwide.

Terence Gallagher
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After seven long years, James Ward is reunited with his childhood friend Cornelia and back among the Dragons, a nation of travelers with roots in the distant Celtic past. This time he is living in the heart of the secret kingdom; but a sudden reversal of fortune throws the Dragons' world into peril and forces James to step up into a new role to save it. (Sequel to Lowlands)
Annette Sisson
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Without its "hue and profusion," Annette Sisson reminds us, "the world is an orphan." And often these poems seek to clothe some austere loneliness in the multiplicity of life's visions and illusions. ... Like all good poetry, Sisson's shows that everything that matters, whether tragic, as in her poem "Eclipse," or buoyant, as in her poem "Résistance," takes place on earth, in our world. This book is a loving celebration of the connections and tensions that help us to live our lives.  - Mark Jarman, author of The Heronry and Dailiness
Peter Dabbene
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​Complex Simplicity reprints the first 101 entries from Peter Dabbene's monthly column in the Hamilton Post newspaper, plus assorted essays focusing on comic books, movies, social media, politics, mixed martial arts, astronomy, and more. With humor and style, these pages probe the important and not-so-important issues of everyday life in New Jersey, and America at large.

William Quincy Belle
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​A post-apocalyptic Sci-Fi thriller.
Antigravity: floating cites. Pandemic: 80% dead. Flesh-eating disease: artificial body parts. Insects as food. And murder in dystopia.
Patrick T. Reardon
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This exceptional book enables us to see, as if for the first time, something that is right under our noses. It is almost impossible to imagine downtown Chicago and the Loop ‘L’ without each other, and Patrick T. Reardon explains just why that is so in a lively narrative full of information and insights.”
​—Carl Smith, author of Chicago's Great Fire: The Destruction and Resurrection of an Iconic American City
Patrick Reardon
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​In “Requiem for David,” Patrick T. Reardon wrestles with the suicide of his brother and the pain they shared as the children of demanding and emotionally absent parents.  Novelist-poet Sandra Cisneros calls Reardon's book “the heart’s howl,” and poet Haki Madhubuti writes: “Reardon’s poetry reminds me of the great poet and Catholic priest, Daniel Berrigan.”

John Michael Flynn
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John Michael Flynn’s language dazzles to a very real end: the exploration and delineation of the free-floating breakdown known as “America.” The range of tones and locales he uses is impressive but more impressive is the feeling invested in what almost inevitably slips through time’s fingers. Anyone wondering where the Whitmanesque impulse has gone need look no further.
—Baron Wormser

Visit  www.basilrosa.com.
Ken Poyner
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​A collection of fantastical mini-fictions. A man who encounters mammoth rustlers. Houses that begin to move on their own, forcing the inhabitants to finally introduce themselves to their neighbors. Giant chickens that are hunted for processing in the chicken sandwich industry. And much more.

​Humor, irony, mythical realism, surrealism, soft science fiction.
​Fred McGavran
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"McGavran’s are stories of obsession and experience. They are the stories of characters who are nearing death and who are thinking about what they will leave behind. They are deeply human, and entirely serious, with a touch of humor and a little bit of magic to light the way."         - Anna Kasik, Englewood Review of Books

Hear Roberta Schultz's review on WVXU
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