WHLReview

145 Foster Street
Littleton MA 01460

The Wilderness House Literary Review is a publication devoted to excellence in literature and the arts.

To contact an editor simply click on a name below. To submit work to us please see "Submissions" below:

Editor & Publisher

Steve Glines 

Poetry Editor

Ravi Yelamanchilli

Poetry Readers

Carol Smallwood
Rose Bagby
Teisha Twomey

Fiction Editor

Tim Gager

Nonfiction Editor

Steve Glines

Book Reviews Editor

Doug Holder

Arts Editor/Curator

 Steve Glines

Poet in Residence

  Tomas O’Leary

 Submissions

Deadlines are as follows
March 1 – Spring
June 1 – Summer
September 1 – Autumn
December 1 – Winter

Please read this section before submitting work.

Please include some form of identification in the work itself.

All submissions must be in electronic form. Our preference is an MS Word file uploaded through the system below. Please do not send us pdf files. We can't use them.

By submitting work to us you grant us a non-exclusive license to publish your work in any form we see fit. You may withdraw a submission up until the issue deadline (see above).

We don't pay so you retain all copyrights. If we publish your work online we may include it in a printed edition.

Poetry may be submitted in any length. Please don't submit 100 poems and ask us to pick 3.

Fiction may be submitted in three formats:

We also accept longer forms of fiction occasionally.

Non-Fiction is just that so lets see some interesting footnotes. Non-fiction should be short, (a lot) less than 5000 words

Book Reviews should be positive unless the author is a well-known blowhard. Our mission is to encourage literature not discourage it..

Any form of art may be submitted with the constraint that it must be something that can be published in 2 dimensions. It’s hard to publish sculpture but illustrations together with some intelligent prose count.

Published works are welcome with proper attribution.

Please submit all works electronically. Click here to submit to Wilderness House Literary Review

Welcome to the 58th issue (Volume 15, no 2) of the Wilderness House Literary Review. WHLR is a result of the collaboration between a group of poets and writers who call themselves the Bagel Bards.

Lets get this out of the way. We use cookies, everyone uses cookies. Our cookies just tell us how many people take a look at Wilderness House Literary Review. Over the life of an issue we get about 1500 unique visitors. The cookies tell us who’s unique. If that's a problem We're sorry. Enough of that.

The stories, articles, poems and examples of art have been presented as PDF files. This is a format that allows for a much cleaner presentation than would otherwise be available on the web. If you don’t have an Adobe Reader (used to read a PDF file) on your computer you can download one from the Adobe website. These files are large and we hope you will be patient when downloading then, however we think the beauty of the words deserves a beautiful presentation.

Wilderness House Press has a Twitter feed and you can find us on Facebook or read about us on Wikipedia.

It costs quite a bit of money to keep publishing WHLR - Please help us out if you can as every little bit helps.

Our ISSN number is 2156-0153.

Let us know what you think in our Letters to the Editor.

Table of Contents

Opine

Art in the time of a Pandemic

We are living the ancient Chinese curse, "May you live in interesting times." It doesn't matter that the current coronavirus originated in China. It's a global problem and especially so in the United States. We are quarantined, isolated, and kept from human contact for the good of society, at least that's the idea. In practice, Americans have an absurd, "Marlboro Man," fixation on rugged individualism, and it's killing us. Tough guys wander around barking like rabid dogs without masks, insisting that the virus is a fake.

With its eight million people, New York City had an average of ~150 deaths a day from all causes in 2019. At the height of the pandemic, New York City had more than 1,000 deaths a day from Covid19. That is not a fake statistic. Right now, more people have died from Covid19 in the United States than were killed in the Vietnam War or the First World War. We're approaching 150,000 unnecessary deaths from Covid19 because merely doing anything about it might make the President look bad. He doesn't seem to get that doing nothing, posing, kills people. Without proper management over two million people in the United States will die before we have "heard immunity."

There was a time when the United States of America was the shining light of universal opportunity. Now we are the pariahs of the world. In less than four years, we have gone from the light of the world to the depths of darkness, depravity, and corruption. What else could possibly go wrong? A second pandemic, a war with ….
On the artistic front, it's been very creative. We received about 100 submissions for the Spring issue but over 300 for this Summer issue. We hope you enjoy the results of everyone's efforts.

Thus we expect a brilliant flowering of artistic works in the following issues.

Don't forget to take a look at Poplar Hill by Stephen Ramey Glines in e-book or on Amazon for hardback. It's super cheep on Amazon.

Search the house

Art

• Edward Michael
• Sarah Platenius

Fiction

For your reading pleasure we offer an outstanding collection of short stories by:

Poetry

Enjoy the collection of poetry we have assembled.

Reviews

WHLReview is brought to you by:

Dosha, flight of the Russian Gypsies
by Sonia Meyer

What Drives Men
By Susan Tepper


The Last of the Bird People
a novel by John Hanson Mitchell


Sophocles' Ajax
translated by Dennis Daly

Ibbetson Street Press