The July/August issue of Tab Journal is live on the Current Issue page.
This new issue features work by Muiz Ọpẹýẹmí Àjàyí, BEE LB, Frances Boyle, Hollie Dugas, Trish Hopkinson, Londeka Mdluli, Gary Mesick, Adesiyan Oluwapelumi, Patty Seyburn, Shannon Elizabeth Hardwick, Jessica Dawn Zinz, and a review of Vandana Khana’s Burning Like Her Own Planet by Ian Koh.
Did you like what you read in the Current Issue (July 2022) of Tab Journal? We want to share more of what our amazing contributors are up to, so here are some links to their websites, social media, and more.
Allison Blevins: http://allisonblevins.com/
Joshua Davis: https://www.joshuadavispoet.com/
Brenda Cárdenas: https://twitter.com/CardenasBrendaE
Ed Go: https://edgosblog.wordpress.com/
Alicia Byrne Keane: https://twitter.com/keane_byrne
Orlando Ricardo Menes: https://www.orlandoricardomenes.com/
Dan Murphy: https://twitter.com/danielconor
Donna Vorreyer: http://donnavorreyer.com/
Kory Wells: https://korywells.com/
Kirby Olson: Kirby Olson is a professor at SUNY Delhi in the western Catskills. His published books include Gregory Corso: Doubting Thomist (Southern Illinois UP 2002), and Andrei Codrescu and the Myth of America (McFarland 2006) and Comedy after Postmodernism (Texas Tech UP 2000).
Ian Koh: https://twitter.com/iannkoh
Thanks to these wonderful writers for trusting Tab Journal with their work!
Every year, Tab Journal launches its new volume with an innovative print issue brimming with new poems. This year’s volume is our 10th, and we have a glittery, striking design to match this celebration of poetry.
Here’s a SNEAK PEAK at the NEW ISSUE in our conversation with Becky Tuch at new episode of Lit Mag News. We also talk about Tab Journal‘s approach to poetry, design, and inclusion. We’ve also updated the website to reflect this year’s design.
Traditionally, in the second week of January, we mail the print issue to all contributors ever. This year, however, the pandemic-instigated paper supply chain problems delayed the printing of our new issue. Don’t worry! The boxes are here, and Tab staff are folding the poems into the booklet format and stuffing the envelopes.
Bonus! You can now listen to all the poems in this issue on the Current Issue page. Poems by Wendy Taylor Carlisle, Kai Coggin, Kylie Gellatly, Hilary King, Jenny Qi, Bibinur Salykova, and Donna Spruijt-Metz.
If you’re interested in using the January 2022 print issue in a poetry or graphic design class this spring, please use the Contact form to request copies. If we have extras, we’re happy to share them with curious readers and librarians.
You’ll always find the latest issue of Tab Journal on the Current Issue page of the website. Right now, that means our November issue featuring the following fantastic work:
HALO and CONVERSION DISORDER, RECURRENT EPISODE, SEVERE
Adrian Odessa Federspiel
GUARDING THRESHOLDS
Pratibha Kelapure
THE FAMILIAR
Shosh Lovett-Graff
HER GAZE
Monica Ong
BECAUSE IT’S SUMMER
Jessie Raymundo
THE GRAVITY OF BELOW
Sarah Snyder
BOOK REVIEW: A Net to Catch my Body in its Weavingby
Katie Farris
Tryphena Yeboah
BOOK REVIEW: Focal Point by Jenny Qi
Ian Koh
We hope you’ll share this issue with others and also follow us on Twitter @TabJournal.
When the next issue is published (every two months), old issues move to our Archives. All issues (2013-present), except the current one, are available there.
Yay! The new print issue of Tab Journal is ready for readers. This issue launches Volume 9 with a large-format design on newsprint and features the work of ten poets, most of whom are making their first appearance in Tab Journal. Before you dive into the poems, we wanted to share this issue’s backstory.
This print issue has been created entirely during a time of quarantine as the world underwent the isolation and anxieties of the Covid-19 pandemic. As a result, we reflected in this issue on concepts of time—as a sense of place, as space, as structure, as the visual experience of light and dark. Time has an impact on psychology; we can lose time or lose track of time. Time has a history of visual representation and documentation as well. This year’s print issue explores visual expressions of time warping, time-traveling, and the chronology and the kaleidoscope of time-keeping. Here, the images and texts engage in ideas of process over time, such as healing or growth.
Also as a result of the pandemic, the Tab staff has very limited access to the office and mail room, and our work continues to be done remotely. We are in the process of getting copies to contributors, not only this issue’s contributors but, as always, to all whose work has appeared in Tab Journal over the entirety of its publication history. We also welcome requests for copies, especially by teachers and librarians to use in discussions and by readers with low hearing; please use the Contact form to make a request. We’re excited to distribute this amazing issue as widely as possible and as soon as possible, given the current constraints.
We hope you’ll look at the Current Issue online and share it with others. Usually, we don’t include the entirety of the print issue online and instead upload only the Table of Contents and elements that convey the new design. Because of pandemic-related delays in mailing, we have uploaded the PDF version of the whole issue as well as audio recordings of all the poems for increased accessibility. Because print offers a very different reading experience than online, we don’t want to replicate the print issue online. The issue uses large-format newsprint, a material mode that further suggests ways we consider time, news, and cultural documents in a so-called post-truth or post-factual age that has seen newspaper staff and circulation decline dramatically. Our website and your screen, therefore, can’t convey how Keith S. Wilson’s poem gallops across the page, and you can’t cut out and fold Amelia L. Williams’s cootie catcher poem to experiment with its possible iterations. Poetry’s ink won’t rub off on your fingers here.
If you’d like to receive a monthly recap of Tab Musings, please sign up for our newsletter. We have lots of plans for 2021! We also encourage you to follow Tab Journal on Twitter and Facebook.
It’s here! Check out the Current Issue for Volume 8, Issue 6.
This issue is the last of 2020 and features poets Matthew J. Andrews, Jake Bailey, Tatiana Dolgushina, Dia Roth, and Kelly S. Samuels, plus reviews of books by Tariq Luthun, Julia Bouwsma, Eve Ewing, and Emily Jungmin Yoon.
The September issue is here—and it’s full of Book-Spine Poems for Pandemic Times.
In 2013, New York-based artist Nina Kathchadourian published a collection of photographs of book spines called Sorted Books. In the book’s introduction, Brian Dillon writes, “it is as though the books have convened of their own accord like plants or insects—following secret or, in the case of more explicitly comic or narrative groupings, not-so-secret attractions.” That project rested on the idea, in Dillon’s words, “that books are objects designed to be handled.”
We’ve been thinking about this project for a long time and about how Tab Journal might encourage found-and-constructed literary and visual art. From its inception, Tab Journal has explored relationships between print and digital forms, between text and image, between writer and reader. In book-spine poems, the reader of books becomes the writer of the poem. The lines are the books’ titles, so is the poem written or curated? Does the poem say as much about the writer–curator’s reading habits as it does about the subject of the poem that’s been constructed?
After the pandemic changed ways we access libraries and physical bookstores, Tab Journal sought poems composed and formed by stacking physical books as objects designed to be handled. This issue of Book-Spine Poems for Pandemic Times is a selection of both individuals’ bookshelves and what’s on people’s minds at this historical moment. Of course, it’s also a collection of remarkable, intriguing poems using shared constraints.
In reading this issue, it’s important also to consider who has a bookshelf at home and what that means. One recent global study indicated that kids who grow up with books in the home tend to perform better academically. A home library is likely a side effect of the sort of wealth and education that open doors as much as it is part of a learning environment that builds skills and empathy that foster achievement. We hope that this issue of Tab Journal opens a larger conversation about books in our lives.
…read more while September is the Current Issue.
Every May, Tab Journal publishes the winners and honorable mentions in the California Coastal Commission’s K-12 Poetry Contest. This year, we feature 19 of the state’s creative kids writing about the California coast, including audio recordings of many of them reading their original work. Let these poems in the Current Issue inspire you!
As part of the judging process, students in poetry at Chapman University read poems by young poets from kindergarten through high school to select the finalists. Annie Frankel, the California Coastal Commission’s Education Coordinator, oversees the final judging and works with the staff of Tab Journal to bring the poems to a wider audience.
Congratulations to the winners and honorable mentions of the 2020 Coastal Poetry Contest!
We are excited to share the March 2020 issue, featuring work by Nathaniel Dolton-Thornton, Vandana Khanna, Nancy Kuhl, January Pearson, Lois Roma-Deeley, Cecilia Woloch, and Tryphenah Yeboah. We look forward to hearing from readers, and we hope you share Tab Journal with friends.
If you missed the January print issue, you can see the Table of Contents in the Volume 8 (2020) Archives. There, we also share the thinking behind this year’s design, which strives to be inclusive as well as innovative. And if you’d like a copy of the print issue, you can use the Contact form on the website to request one. Unfortunately, because Chapman University is under a stay-at-home order, we are not able to mail it out right away.
Going forward, we’ll refer to TAB: The Journal of Poetry & Poetics by the informal name Tab Journal. In the past, we’ve used the word “TAB” in all caps to refer to our project, but we realized that e-readers read that as the distinct letters “T-A-B” as if it were an acronym. For greater accessibility, we’ve now adopted Tab Journal as our informal name. For citations and the ISSN, we retain the official name TAB: The Journal of Poetry & Poetics.