Poetry by Jeffrey Skinner and Julia Story. Interviews with T.C. Boyle, Bob Hicok, and Jean Valentine.
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Telling Stories Talking Craft
Sycamore Review's collection of interviews with contemporary fiction writers, including Michael Chabon, Richard Ford, Jane Hamilon, and many more, is now available from our publishing partner, Parlor Press.
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NEWS  by Rob Davidson
Every good story collection has its governing metaphors, those common notes that blend the individual crooners into a concert of voices singing harmony. Restlessness defines the spirited characters in Patricia Henley’s fine new collection of short fiction, Other Heartbreaks. In these stories, people’s lives break down and are reassembled; there are changes of allegiance and sexual orientation; there are moments of great sweetness and moments of insufferable loss. As one narrator puts it, these are tales of “broken hearts, mended hearts, eternal stories of love lost and gained.”
Henley moves across the territories of her stories with deceptive ease, ranging back and forth in time, layering with moves both small and large, gradually filling in the context for a dramatic present that is always tied in interesting and complicated ways to the past. Henley’s stories require …MORE
NEWS By Jessica Jacobs, Editor-in-Chief
 After Sycamore editors carefully culled 20 finalists from a Wabash Contest record of nearly 600 entries, former U.S. Poet Laureate Louise Glück has selected Maya Jewell Zeller and her poem “Caterpillars” as the winner of this year’s Wabash Prize for Poetry. Glück also chose Carrie Causey and her poem “Woman in the Wall” as this year’s contest runner-up. Both of these poems will be showcased in Issue 24.1, Winter/Spring 2011, along with work from selected finalists.
Thanks to all who submitted. We hope you will continue to support and enjoy Sycamore and will consider submitting your work to the 2012 Wabash Prize for Poetry next year.
Complete Results: 2011 Wabash Poetry Prize
Winner:
Maya Jewell Zeller
First Runner-Up:
Carrie Causey
Second Runner-Up:
Michael Tyrell
Third Runner-Up:
Grace Marie Grafton
Finalists: Terry Blackhawk Sage Cohen …MORE
CONVERSATIONS by Jacob Sunderlin, Co-Editor of Poetry
One hundred and fifty-seven years ago today, a provocateur was born in France. Arthur Rimbaud—published by fifteen, retired by twenty, dead by forty—wrote famously in 1871: “I’m now making myself as scummy as I can. Why? I want to be a poet, and I’m working at turning myself into a seer. You won’t understand any of this, and I’m almost incapable of explaining it to you. The idea is to reach the unknown by the derangement of all the senses. It involves enormous suffering, but one must be strong and be a born poet. It’s really not my fault.”
Coincidentally, he who was “from the depths of the sea, back to the block”–Snoop D-O-double-G–was also born today, forty years ago.
We were recently treated to this wonderful new translation of Rimbaud’s sonnet “Rêvé pour l’hiver” by poet, physician, and translator Jenna Le, who …MORE
FICTION  by Conor Broughan
It’s been a big year for Issue 23.1 contributor Edith Pearlman. In January, Lookout Books published Binocular Vision, a career spanning collection of new and selected stories. In June, she received the prestigious Pen/Malamud Award by the Pen/Faulkner Foundation. Today, the National Book Foundation announced that Binocular Vision is finalist for the National Book Award in Fiction. Congratulations!
Oh yeah…she also contributed her wild and wonderful “Last Words” in Sycamore Review’s Winter/Spring 2011 issue. Be sure to check out our review of Binocular Vision and interview with Edith Pearlman before you pick up your own copy of Issue 23.1 here.
EVENTS by Lindsey Alexander, Visiting Writers Series Coordinator
More than 120 people crowded Krannert Auditorium to hear Mary Leader read from her latest collection, Beyond the Fire, last week. These poems explore themes of heritage—Leader’s hometown, Pawnee, Oklahoma, appears in the text—but also feminism, romantic love, and family. Alternating wonderfully personal moments of self-doubt with voices that seem to come from “anonymous scribes,” Leader shared with her audience the new expressions possible in her experimental poetic forms.
Her poem “They Vibrate,” which replicates the texture of woven art and blurs the sound and appearance of pairs of words across many different lines, was projected on a screen behind her during the reading.
Leader said her obsession with the colors red and blue, as well as their optic effects on the mind, has seeped into Beyond the Fire. In the Q and A, the colors and visual textures in her …MORE
NEWS  by Conor Broughan
Patricia Henley, a faculty member in the Purdue creative writing program, has a new collection of short stories Other Heartbreaks that will be published on October 11, 2011. She recently wrote a post on the Glimmer Train website about her publishing experience for this book.
Robert Olen Butler called Henley’s new collection “splendid” and that “the sweet sadness of life shimmers in these tales. Patricia Henley is one of our culture’s finest chroniclers of the human heart.”
Check out the book trailer for Other Heartbreaks and be sure to pick it up at your local bookstore or Engine Books on October 11th.
NEWS In an effort to optimize our website for your viewing enjoyment, we here at Sycamore are reformatting our site design and apologize for any inconvenience this might cause. Our content, however, will stay steadfast.
Until things find their equilibrium, feel free to cozy up to former versions of our site from 2010 or from our green monster days of 2006, courtesy of the Wayback Machine.
NEWS by Corey Van Landingham
Poetry Co-Editor
Dearest poets,
Do you know what I’m looking forward to doing this weekend? Well, other than bourbon and Ethiopian food, the answer is reading your entries to the Wabash Poetry Prize, judged by the one and only Louise Gluck! Tomorrow is the post mark deadline, so make sure you all get your best work together, go buy that ten pack of kraft clasp envelopes, some fancy, or not so fancy stamps, and put your name in the running to win $1,000. Do you know how much hot sauce that can buy? A lot. So send us your finest, because I hope that someday, your poems and I will be together.
REVIEWS by A.E. Watkins
 In a country and age without epics, we have only lyrics, each a minor hero that braves a domesticated and commodified world. Lily Brown’s first book, Rust or Go Missing, affirms the dangers of such a world, navigating the real hazards that hide in our postmodern (mis)understanding of the spaces we live in and live by. Each poem reminds us that, in such spaces, our speech is all that can condemn or save us.
Finding recourse in comic books and antiquated armor on display, these poems hint at the traces of the heroic and the extra-ordinary in our everyday. What works in these poems is a tension that arises from the Romanticism caught in the traps of quotidian rooms and quotidian love. In the book’s closing poem, “Museum Armor,” we find ourselves in an …MORE
NEWS by Corey Van Landingham Poetry Co-Editor
So remember when I said Jacob and I have big shoes to fill following the departure of Mario Chard and Josh Wild as Poetry Editors? Well, as we all know here at Purdue, their prowess doesn’t stop at putting together stellar issues of Sycamore Review.
In a couple of weeks, Mario will begin the first year of his Wallace Stegner Fellowship. California dreaming, indeed! We wish we were there to pack him a lunch on his first big day.
And Josh’s poem “Self-Portrait after Paul Morphy’s Stroke” appeared in the May 2011 issue of Poetry. He’s not “all thumbs” at all!
Dang. It’s getting hot in here, and it’s not just this dreaded heat wave.
We’re all incredibly proud of these guys, though we know that …MORE
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