The Juice
The Juice is an online publication featuring writing on writing. This includes craft essays, book reviews, literacy narratives, interviews, scholarly essays on literature, and cross-disciplinary conversations. Submit your work on Submittable.
Bread & Butter
When artists feel powerless, like their creativity and poetry is not enough (for themselves or for any real change), it is not the fault of the artist; it is by the design of capitalism, colonialism, and patriarchy. In her essay “Poetry Is Not a Luxury,” Audre Lorde tells us, “For within structures defined by profit, by linear power, by institutional dehumanization, our feelings were not meant to survive.” Therefore, in order to decolonize our relationship with writing and publishing, to re-empower ourselves by shifting our focus, and take everyone we can along for the ride, we must look in a different direction than perpetuating the status quo. We can feed multiple birds with one scone by learning a new craft and feeling the joy of bringing people together by giving something back. And so I did.
There Is No Refuge: A Review of Agustina Bazterrica’s The Unworthy
The Unworthy is undoubtedly horror—tension and fear permeate every page, along with death and cruelty and cockroaches—but by setting the story in a combined tech-climate disaster, Bazterrica pulls a strong current of science fiction in as well, playing on the globe’s most pressing anxieties, and the two genres only heighten each other. Horror is the art of emotional manipulation. Science fiction is, as Ray Bradbury coined it, the art of the possible.
Scary Poppins
Reading this psychological novel feels a lot like holding your breath. In it, there is an ever-present sense of evil and violence; a presence that would be minimized if the violent climax was actually depicted. In her withholding, Slimani expertly disconnects the known and the suggested, allowing her abundant foreshadowing to fill in the space that she leaves.
Breakage and Silence: the Poetry of Under Flag by Myung Mi Kim in Times of Global Crisis
Silence, like its close friend death, is unavoidable, and it comes and goes as it pleases. It quietly haunts the borders of meaning, lurking in the subtle folds of symbolism, waiting for the words to fade, allowing itself to sink back into the comforting realm of perplexity and incomprehension in pages that feel “crowded” with blank space. Silence in these poems reveals more than it conceals, and in its death-like quality, it envisages the catastrophe of the linguistic trauma of bodies that migrate to survive amidst war and seek a utopia, always on the verge of oblivion.
ᎤᏬᎯᏳᎯᏍᏓ ᎠᎵᎢᏗᏍᎩ: the obedient traitor
Cherokee is not spoken objectively, nor are semantic elements something of an isolating, demarcating machine. The language is concerned with the nature of phenomena, causal agents, and subsequent effects. Syntactic axioms are constantly moving, true for a moment, and forever shifting as time marches on.
Window to the Self: Excavating Identity in Contemporary Poetry
The Collection of poetry, to me, has always been a snippet of, or window into, identity; but in recent years this seems to have become a truly inescapable facet of the current condition and direction of the Collection.
An Interview With Alex Baskin
In honor of the publication of Alex Baskin’s I wake up tangled in pillows and sheets, winner of Fork Apple Press’ The Slice Poetry Chapbook Contest, we interviewed Alex for our readers of The Juice to learn more about his project, influences, and craft.
From the Founders: The Fork Apple Vision
We envision The Juice as a place to feature the thoughts of writers and readers, both including and beyond the staff of Fork Apple Press. We see these posts as being more interactive than other publishing mediums, and to that end where we encourage our readership to write to us and each other in the comments, and continue the conversation begun in the blog post.
Want to be featured on The Juice?
We’d love to consider your work! We publish explorations of and reflections on the writing process. This includes craft essays, book reviews, literacy narratives, interviews, scholarly essays on literature, and cross-disciplinary conversations.
Want your book added to the Review List?
The Review List is a working list of titles that we would love to have reviewed on The Juice. We are actively collecting review copies to be made available to interested reviewers. We update our Review List with titles we are excited about and that reflect the values and editorial mission of the press. If you are an author who would like to have your title reviewed by one of our contributors, you may send a review copy to ATTN: Katie Mihalek, 390 Broadway, Somerville, MA 02145. Please keep in mind that sending us a copy of your book does not guarantee that your book will be added to the Review List.
If you would like to submit a book review for publication consideration on The Juice, you may submit a review on any title (not limited to those on the Review List) via our Submittable portal. If reviewing a title on this list, you are welcome to reach out to forkapplepress@gmail.com (mailto:forkapplepress@gmail.com) to see if the editorial staff has a review copy on hand to send to you.