Blood Orange Review would like to congratulate Todd Heldt for the publication of his full-length collection of poetry, Card Tricks for the Starving, through Ghost Road Press. Heldt’s poem, “Gather Us” appeared in Blood Orange Review in Volume 2.5.

Congratulations to Sean Patrick Hill

We would like to congratulate Sean Patrick Hill, whose poem "Love Terns" was first published in Volume 4.1. His first book of poetry, The Imagined Field, is being published by Paper Kite Press, and will be available in February. You can read more about the book and Hill's other works on his blog.

Blood Orange Review Partners with Washington State University

We are pleased to announce that a selection of exceptional students from the Washington State University English Department have joined the Blood Orange Review team as editorial interns. In order to qualify for this internship, candidates were required to go through a rigorous editing and interview process. We selected the top five of these candidates.


(From left to right: Grace Carlson, Deven Tokuno, Maddie Starkovich, Caitlin Woelfel, and Simmone Quesnell)

The interns will spend the semester reading submissions and writing blogs, and meeting once a week with WSU instructor and co-editor, Bryan Fry to discuss possible pieces for upcoming issues. The Washington State University English department has been a strong supporter of Blood Orange Review and we are grateful for this opportunity to work with WSU students.

We’d like to thank our interns for their hard work and commitment to publishing high quality writing!

Photo by Debbie Lee, WSU English Professor

Blood Orange Review 4.4 is here!

We're pleased to announce the new issue of Blood Orange Review.

Featuring artwork by Craig Billow, the Western Australian showcase with audio poetry, and an announcement of our 2010 nominees for the Pushcart Prize.

This issue includes work by:

Seth Borgen
Bridget Hardy
Mandy Malloy
Diane Seuss
David Susman
Eric Vithalani

Editor’s Note
Blood Orange Review 4.4

This issue came together in a quietly spectacular way. As we put together the proofs, frost was icing the lawns of Salem, Oregon. Men were climbing ladders and hanging Christmas lights from the rooftops. As we edited the issue, we listened to the recordings of the Western Australian poems and communicated with the poets through email. Their voices and work radiated warmth in the chilly Pacific Northwest day. [continued]

Good News from Blood Orange Poet

Congratulations to Sally Albiso for publishing her chapbook through Camber Press and for receiving the Fourth Annual Camber Press Poetry Chapbook Award.

Albio’s book, entitled Newsworthy, was selected by poet Steve Orlen who writes: “From a man obsessed with female mannequins to twins fighting for survival in an incubator, Albiso brings us a range of humanity — absurd, touching, and everything in between — and delivers them in tightly crafted poems.” To read more of Orlen’s praise or to purchase Albiso’s book, please visit Camber Press here.

You can also read some of Albiso’s chapbook poems by visiting the first issue of Blood Orange Review: 1.1.

Blood Orange Review 4.3 is here!

We're pleased to announce the new issue of Blood Orange Review.

Featuring photography by Jim Lind, audio poetry, and an interview with award-winning poet Brian Turner.

This issue includes work by:

Jackie Bartley
Kimberly Burwick
Cecelia Hagen
Addie Hopes
Sister Hilda Kleiman
Caroline Klocksiem
Sara E. Lamers
Colette Tennant
Brian Turner
Sarah Zale

Editor’s Note -- The Big Picture

Blood Orange Review 4.3

I don’t remember which we accepted first for this new issue, Addie Hopes’ prose piece “Not a Love Story” or Sara E. Lamers’ poem “Proof:A Love Story.” But I do remember what it feltlike: grabbing two pieces from a just opened jigsaw puzzle and having them snap effortlesslytogether ... [continued]

Blood Orange Writer Receives Pushcart Mention

Congrats to Brandon R. Schrand, whose essay “On Failure” received an honorable mention in the 2010 Pushcart Prize anthology. Read his essay here.

Since 1976, the Pushcart Prize anthology has been published from an 8' x 8' backyard shack on Long Island, NJ. This honored literary project collects the best of the year’s writing from small presses and literary journals. We are pleased to have one of our writers, published from equally humble origins—a laptop on an editor’s kitchen table—recognized by this prestigious press.

Each year Blood Orange Review nominates writers from the previous year’s issue for anthologies and prizes, such as the Pushcart. It’s our way of continuing to support those who believe in us enough to send their best work our way.

Honoring Our Veterans

In honor of Veterans Day, Blood Orange Review is posting an excerpt of an interview with poet Brian Turner, author of Here, Bullet and US Army veteran who served in Iraq and Bosnia-Herzegovina. The newest issue of Blood Orange Review, coming out in mid-November, will feature the full interview with the award-winning poet.

* * *

HKH: At a panel you participated in at the 2009 AWP conference, I was moved by what you had to say about our responsibility towards returning veterans. Can you tell me more about what you see our citizens' responsibility is to our veterans?

BT: For the health of our large and complicated tribe, America, we must not bury the living among us. Ignoring the walking wounded who return from war, marked and altered by what we cannot see (as well as those whose physical wounds are evident)—this is not the answer. Ignoring them only helps the next generation gain an inheritance they would be healthier without. How do I say this? We, as a nation, are like a small pond. If the water is troubled for one, it is troubled for all—whether we are aware of it, or not. And if we are not aware of this dynamic, what does that say about us as well, as a nation, as a people? How great are a people who can wage a war and care little, if any, for those they wage it against? How great are a people who can wage a war and care little, if any, for those who wage it for us?

* * *

Check back in mid-November for the full interview: http://www.bloodorangereview.com.

See our listing on NewPages!

NewPages.com is one of our favorite online resources, so we're thrilled to have a listing on the site so that more readers and writers can find us. Take a look at our description and while you're there browse through other print and online journal listings as well.

Blood Orange Review
Blood Orange Review publishes fiction, poetry, and nonfiction in an online quarterly. Established in 2006, the review is committed to cultivating an audience for exciting literary voices and promoting its writers.
[Read more about Blood Orange Review]

Review of "Suitcase" from recent issue

Here's an excerpt from a review of Diane Simmons' "Suitcase," published in the most recent volume of Blood Orange Review. Click on the link below to go to the full review.

Her finely-realized fiction piece, "Suitcase," is an incisive look at the hazy dawn of a young girl's maturity and simultaneous capture of the slow fade of an earlier idealistic era.

Read Diane's work in its entirety here.

Blood Orange in the News!

Orange with envy
Writers and artists nationwide vie to have works published in the online-only literary journal Blood Orange Review
By Barbara Curtin • Statesman Journal
August 14, 2009


Poets and artists nationwide vie for a chance to appear in the Blood Orange Review, a literary journal published from Salem. The latest issue came out last weekend, but you won't find it in local bookstores. It's published online only at http://www.bloodorangereview.com/. Internet publication made it possible to create the journal on a shoestring budget four years ago, said co-editor Stephanie Lenox of Salem. The online-only format continues to be an asset during tough times. [Read the entire article]

Blood Orange Review 4.2 is here!

We're so excited to announce our new issue of Blood Orange Review!

Featuring artwork by Leonard A. Heid, audio poetry, and translations from Romanian poet Floarea Ţuţuianu.

This issue includes work by:

Tabitha Dial
Bonnie McClellan
Colin Pope
Diane Simmons
David Thacker
Donna D. Vitucci
Lafayette Wattles

Editor’s Note--The Familiar Blip
Blood Orange Review 4.2

Last week at the local Goodwill, I found an old AIWA stereo that plays compact discs and cassette tapes. It was equipped with a speaker and a red and black wire that one would have to manually attach the speaker to the outlet in the back of the stereo. The speaker box was large, the size of a small filing cabinet, but probably weighed less than three pounds. I inspected the tag where someone had scribbled ten dollars in a blue sharpie. I inquired from one of the workers if the stereo worked. She smiled strangely—insultingly—and said yes. I smiled back, thinking sold. [continued]

Nominations for Best New Poets 2009

Blood Orange Review is pleased to announce its nominations for Best New Poets 2009. For those of you who are unaware, Best New Poets is an anthology that selects 50 poems from literary magazines and writing programs each year. Jeb Livingood, series editor, approached our table at this year’s AWP conference, though this was not our first introduction to BNP. Our very own Stephanie Lenox published her poem, “Making Love to Leopard Man”, in the 2006 series.

Our Nominations:

Sarah Layden—“Something in the Way”

Jacqueline Powers—“Continuum Mechanics”

We appreciate publications that focus on emerging writers and hope you will keep an eye out for this year’s selection which BNP will announce sometime after June 1. By the way, every year features a guest editor and the GE this year is the fun, intriguing, and perhaps infamous poet Kim Addonizio.

Sweet Sixteen

We're pleased to announce the arrival of the 16th issue of Blood Orange Review!

It's nice, clean and ready for a new day!









Featuring artwork by:
Charles Borges Accardi

Writing by:

Bridget Bell
Jon Boisvert
Leah Browning
Scott Gould
Sean Patrick Hill
Jalina Mhyana
Adam Pellegrini
Richard Schiffman

And audio poems by:

Anne Haines
Sarah Layden

Happy ♥ Day!

The next issue of Blood Orange Review will be coming out at the end of the month. In the meantime, please enjoy this Valentine from poet Sean Patrick Hill, who will appear in the forthcoming issue. (Sign up here to be first in line to get an email when the new issue is available.)

Love Terns
to Erynn

There is no love like theirs.
They couple, I’m told,
for life.

They build no nest
but balance eggs in palms,
on fronds and bare branches.

When trade winds come
roaring off the ocean,
there is no greater exposure,

and terns have no choice,
either they know
or hope

the branch will hold.
I can’t pretend to know
on what such brooding turns.

Theirs is the deepest love.
They must prevail.
The wind will never end.



About the poet: Sean Patrick Hill is a freelance writer in Portland, Oregon. He earned his MA in Writing from Portland State University, where he won the Burnham Graduate Award. He received a grant from Regional Arts and Culture Council and residencies from Montana Artists Refuge, Fishtrap, and the Oregon State University Trillium Project. His poems appear or are forthcoming in Exquisite Corpse, elimae, diode, In Posse Review, Willow Springs, RealPoetik, New York Quarterly, Copper Nickel, Juked, Sawbuck, Redactions, and Quarter After Eight. He also is a blogger for Fringe Magazine. His blog site is theimaginedfield.blogspot.com.

About the poem: "Long story short: I wrote the poem after watching the same PBS special about the Seychelle Islands and the "Love Terns" there over the course of a few years. Spent seven hours or so writing the poem for my wife. A friend told me to enter it in this "Love Letter" contest held by the millionaire Henry Zimand in honor of his wife, Anda, who died fairly young of cancer. I was a finalist, and Henry flew Erynn and I to NYC on Valentine's Day, put us up in a Central Park Hotel, and gave us $500. This was during the nor'easter that dumped 27 inches of snow in one night. We met the actress Jane Seymour who stood next to me and read my poem on television (apparently, national). Then we got a carriage ride through Central Park. Not only that, but we realized we were the grand prize winners, and thus Henry flew my wife and I to Europe and put us up for 5 nights in Monte Carlo, on a hotel on the Mediterranean, plus $1000. We asked if he could fly us into London and out of Madrid, and hence we had our honeymoon. We still have quite a time considering our luck."

Table 728 in Chicago

Come visit the Blood Orange Review table at AWP in Chicago, February 11 - 14. All the editors will be there.

Stop by and say "hi" and pick up our snazzy new postcards to send to a friend. The new issue will be out by the end of the month, so keep your eyes peeled!

Blood Orange Review 3.4 is here

Editor’s Note--Stung
Blood Orange Review 3.4

In a story from this new issue, “Once the Queen Is Gone” by Jeremy Griffin, one character chooses to study biochemistry, specifically the pheromones of honeybees, after being attacked by a hive that results in a week’s stay in the hospital. In the same story, the main character arrives on the doorstep of a former lover to “tell her things about love and fulfillment and mistakes and forgiveness,” or, on second thought, maybe just to see what might happen. Drawn to what has stung them, both characters find themselves pinned between what they separately want and fear.

The poems of Jeff Hanson reveal a person seeking to remake himself, and in one instance, getting what he wants only to find he can’t handle it. In “The Artist’s Father” by Brently Johnson, a father watches his son and weighs, self-consciously, whether it’s the moment itself or the preservation of that moment through language that matters more. “Avalanche” by Gregory Lawless offers a speaker tumbling through life after life hoping eventually to get it right. Poem after poem, story after story, the voices in this issue waver then begin, ever so slightly, to tip.

Jim Fagiolo’s unnervingly beautiful landscapes appear as monumental still lifes. Look at “Ruby Lake” or “Portage Glacier” which serves as the doorway to our new issue; so clear and reflective, the water seems to point to the impossibility of it staying that way. If you found yourself on a dock like the one in “Blue Lake,” how could you not throw a stone out and ruin all that stillness?

I’m drawn to the way the work here pulls the reader into that frozen moment through words or images. We’re along for the ride as the subjects, for better or worse, try to make something happen. It feels right that they don’t always know what they want or where they’re going or why they do the things they do. Rattled or wounded, the subjects take us out of our own uncertainty and give us the uncertainty of someone else to ponder for a while. Thank you, literature and art; it’s exactly what we need right now.

Stephanie Lenox, editor
Blood Orange Review

PS – In this issue, the editors have selected several works to be nominated for a Pushcart Prize. We’re thankful for the work in this issue and in all the ones we’ve published, which after stinging us once, continues to draw us toward it.

September Issue of Blood Orange Review

Editor’s Note -- Soft Light
Blood Orange Review 3.3

I used to live a couple of blocks from Raymond Carver’s former home. In the evenings, I’d walk past on the dark street and peer in through the warm light of the undressed windows to see walls of bookshelves in an empty living room. I always half expected to glance in and see him sitting in a worn chair, reading in the soft light. Somehow, it was comforting to think that at one point, he sat right there, in a little house at the intersection of two anonymous streets. He and I shared the same view of the sometimes turbulent and sometimes pacific Strait of Juan de Fuca .

When the cacophony of human life becomes hushed and I am granted the chance to observe discreetly, I become mesmerized with the tender, tragic theater before me. When I stride anonymously along the unlit sidewalks and look into windows at the sheeted birdcages and abandoned dining rooms, I can imagine the lives of the people that had just slipped invisibly out of sight. I love them, the ghosts that haunt my nighttime meanderings. This is the way literature blends in with my day and blurs at the edges. It is the way I carry other writers and their creations with me.

The writing and artwork in the current issue of Blood Orange Review has captivated me in much the same way. Douglas Bruton’s short piece, “A Pebble from the River for Annie” shows a character during a crisis moment that will re-shape the very essence of her being for the rest of her life; the young girl will haunt me as much as Dickens’ Miss Havisham. Laura Ring’s poem, “Grimes Grave” is one that must be read out loud to feel the muscle and grist and hear the scrape of metal on stone.

The issue is compact and powerful, but it isn’t all seriousness or tragedy; Brandon R. Schrand and Calvin Mills offer two humorous contemplations on the ways two writers confront failure. And Jane Linders’ photography (Mike Ross’ Big Rig Jig is show above) is quirky and marvelous.

The September 2008 issue of Blood Orange Review has come together in the midst of intense political, economic, and social anxiety, and I think that it is palpable in the issue. It feels like a strong vibration in the air, perhaps something like oboe music drifting in from the neighbor’s backyard.

Heather K. Hummel, editor
Blood Orange Review

Where do your rejections live?

Keep your eye out for the next issue of Blood Orange Review appearing online later this month. Below is an excerpt from a forthcoming essay by Calvin Mills entitled "Mathematics, Gallbladders, and Sticking Your Babies in the Mail". To be alerted to the publication of the next issue, which will include the full text of this essay and other great works by new and established writers, enter your contact information in the box to the right of this post.

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This simple mathematical approach allowed me to see my rejections not as personal attacks, but as steps forward, items checked off a list. Incidentally, this method did work for me. I landed a story before I hit 100. I still use this method from story to story. I keep sending them out, and sometimes I actually smile a bit when I get a rejection in the mail, because it means my evil plan is working.

Now that you’re considering doing the math and sending your big-eyed babes out into the wild, wild world, here are a few thoughts to help you stay sane during the process:

1. Never have just one baby in the mail. . .
2. Consider the magical power of “buffer time”. . .
3. Read rejection letters just far enough to determine they are actually rejection letters. Then stop reading. . .
4. Sometimes adversity is your friend. Don’t believe me? Make a list of 100 successful child actors. Try to find more than five who you admire now that they’re grown up. . .
5. Remember that there is always another (or a better) magazine out there. . .

Of course, after the thin, crummy advice above wears off, some small part of you is bound to feel like a failure when an editor sends a neglected baby back to your ZIP code. But don’t let that part of you be a big, important organ like your brain or your heart. Don’t even let it be your lungs—we don’t want them letting you down while you sleep. Sleep apnea is a bitch. Allow the failure to be housed in a small unimportant organ inside you­—one you can live without. A tonsil or appendix would be my first choice, but many of you may already be sans these superfluous organs. Then what? Okay, I know what you’re considering, but let’s not lose our fertility over this. I was thinking more along the lines of the gallbladder, or a single kidney. Do some research, and choose your own failure hotel somewhere on a less popular street along the super-highways that are your entrails. Once you’ve designated the location, run your establishment like the old commercials for the Roach Motel, “Rejections check in­—but they don’t check out!”

Calvin Mills teaches English at Peninsula College in Port Angeles, Washington. His stories and creative nonfiction essays have appeared in Short Story, WeirdTales, The Caribbean Writer, Tales from the South Vol. 1, Timber Creek Review, Southern Indiana Review, and other journals and magazines.

Excerpt from "On Failure" by Brandon R. Schrand

Keep your eye out for the next issue of Blood Orange Review appearing online later this month. Below is an excerpt from a forthcoming essay by Brandon R. Schrand entitled "On Failure". To be alerted to the publication of the next issue, which will include the full text of this essay and other great works by new and established writers, enter your contact information in the box to the right of this post.

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On Failure

When you Google the words failure + literary + writer in a single search, you will be greeted with 1,970,000 returns. It’s an ominous but not surprising number. Of course not all of those returns deal explicitly with the literary writer as failure, but most do, and I think the number of returns reflects a certain inescapable truth about our business: the writing life is shaped, in one way or another, by failure. It’s one of the only careers in which you begin as a failure. Failure is the baseline, the starting point. Curious about my search results, I thought I would put the number of returns in context of other careers. This is what I learned:

A search for the words failure + librarian yields an alarming if depressing 400,000 results.

A search for failure + cryptozoologist retrieves only 73,600 results.

Googling failure + “worm farmer” yields a mere 508 returns.

And finally, you’ll be happy to know that a search for failure + “cheese attendant” will give you 0 returns.


If there is a lesson to be gleaned from my inquiry, I’m not sure what it is. However, it does strike me as peculiar, refreshing even, that to be a writer engaged in a profession that is colored by failure is another way of saying you are among friends, that there is safety in numbers, as they say. On the other hand, if you failed as a cheese attendant, you would be the first and only failure in that unsung occupation. The cheese attendant would stand alone, in other words, and that cheese attendant would be you. . . .



Brandon R. Schrand is the author of The Enders Hotel: A Memoir, the 2007 River Teeth Literary Nonfiction Prize winner and a 2008 Barnes & Noble Discover Great New Writers selection. His work has appeared or is forthcoming in The Dallas Morning News, The Utne Reader, Tin House, Shenandoah, The Missouri Review, Columbia, Colorado Review, Green Mountains Review, River Teeth, Ecotone, Isotope, and numerous other publications. He has won the Wallace Stegner Prize, the 2006 Willard R. Espy Award, the Pushcart Prize, two Pushcart Prize Special Mentions, and his essay, “The Enders Hotel,” the title piece from his memoir, was a Notable Essay in the Best American Essays 2007. A two-time grant recipient of the Charles Redd Center for Western Studies, he lives in Moscow, Idaho, with his wife and two children where he coordinates the MFA Program in Creative Writing at the University of Idaho.