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Steve at KGB Bar in New York

For all our New York readers and fans, Steve will be at the KGB Bar November 1 for an issue release party from 7-9 for our upcoming fall issue. Ron Kolm, David Lawton, Alberto Zayden, Amy Barone, Paul Pines, Jennifer Juneau, Simon Pettet and Jeffrey Cyphers Wright will be joining Steve for an evening filled with readings and fun. Come join us!! Check out the KGB bar event page for more info: http://kgbbar.com/calendar/events/kgb_release_party_for_the_cafe_review/

Megan Grumbling reading at THRICE

Our wonderful Reviews Editor, Megan Grumbling, will be reading with Rebecca Morgan Frank and Rosa Lane on October 25 at Longfellow Books in Portland, Maine! Come hang out and listen to some great poetry!

From the THRICE event page:

2017 Maine Literary Award-winning poets Megan Grumbling and Rosa Lane read with special guest poet Rebecca Morgan Frank at Longfellow Books in Portland.

Rebecca Morgan Frank is visiting Maine to launch her third poetry collection: Sometimes We’re All Living in a Foreign Country (Carnegie Mellon University Press). Frank’s work has appeared or is forthcoming in some of the countries most revered publications, such places as The New Yorker, American Poetry Review, Ploughshares, New England Review. She is the co-founder and editor of the online literary magazine Memorious and currently the poet-in-residence at Brandeis University.
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Megan Grumbling‘s debut poetry collection Booker’s Point (University of North Texas Press, 2016)—an oral history-driven portrait of an old Mainer—won the 2017 Maine Book Award for Poetry. Grumbling’s work has been awarded the Poetry Foundation’s Ruth Lilly Fellowship, the Robert Frost Award, a Hawthornden Fellowship at Hawthornden Castle, Scotland, and a St. Boltoph Emerging Artist Award.
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Rosa Lane’s poem “Boats Named Women” won the 2017 Maine Book Award for Short Works Poetry. The poem appears in Lane’s collection Tiller North (Sixteen Rivers Press, 2016). Lane’s chapbook Roots and Reckonings (Granite Press, East) was published in 1980, and her work has appeared in numerous journals, including The Briar Cliff Review, Crab Orchard Review, New South, and Ploughshares. She works as an architect and divides her time between coastal Maine and the San Francisco Bay Area.
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Frank
https://rebeccamorganfrank.com/books/sometimes-were-all-living-in-a-foreign-country/

Grumbling
http://www.megangrumbling.com/bookers-point-1

Lane
http://www.rosalane.com/Tiller-North.html

Common Sense for Girls in Remote Places

Spring 2024 Cafe Review Cover

By Karen Douglas

1. Don’t obey your mother if she sends you into the woods alone,
carrying hot food that smells tempting.

2. If you meet a wolf, don’t tell him your destination,
and knowing that he’s nearby, do not stop to pick flowers
for your granny. At the least the food will get cold.

3. If you have a daughter, please don’t send her into the woods
alone.

4. Granny, if you are old, blind, and bedridden,
ask to move out of a remote home.
If that is not possible, lock your door.

Nostalgia

Spring 2024 Cafe Review Cover

By Thomas Luhrmann

Well–defined pockets of chaos
litter an otherwise uncluttered landscape

and as it recedes the mindless roar of the alien system
is beginning to resemble

an ultraviolet sea fan far more than a silver broach,
a toothpick or some unrepentant swan

Like the collision of two extraordinarily different worlds
that have little in common but a passion for secrecy

we stand before each other naked and unashamed
and for the umpteenth time

the simplicity of the calliope on the ice cream van
takes us back to a more innocent age

when hamburgers frying on a charcoal grill
would partially restore the borderline psychotics

and conditions favoring the algae’s sudden efflorescence
remained a stupefying mystery