Click the cover to download Issue 11

Issue 11 Contributors: Jim Davis, Jeremy Radin, Dalton Day, Brandon Ricks, Katherine Frain, Joel Allegretti, Annelyse Gelman, Janet Frishberg, Christine Hamm, Hillary Katz, Erin Dorney, Christopher Suda, Christina Hammerton, David Chorlton, Alicia Wright, Kate Petroff, and  Amanda Silbernagel.

Here you will find poems that speak, insistently, for themselves.

Click the cover to download Issue 10

Issue 10 Contributors:  MJ Gette, Jennifer MacBain-Stephens, Maggie Woodward, Sara Williams, Darren C. Demaree, Cecelia Hagen, Gail C. DiMaggio, Christine Hamm, Jackson Burgess, Jolene Brink, David J. Thompson, Matthew Powers King, Aaron Brand, Sara Uribe translated by Toshiya Kamei, Annemarie Ní Churreáin, Caroline Klocksiem, Robert S. King, Frank Rossini, Justin Robinson, Michael Dwayne Smith, Sara Biggs Chaney, Rhea Cinna, and Carol Berg.

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This is an issue of setbacks. Of waiting. Of losing patience, and direction, and loved ones. But this is also an issue of talking back and taking aim and holding tight to hope. This is an issue of ripe plums, long horizons, bees sifted from milk. This is your issue.

Click the cover to download Issue 9

Issue 9 Contributors: Renee Emerson, Molly Spencer, Maureen Kingston, Darren Demaree, Philip Kobylarz, Howie Good, Christopher Leibow, Holly Day, Carol Guess, Kristina Marie Darling, Joseph Goosey, Colin Dodds, Julie Dearborn, Daniel M. Shapiro, Mark Waclawiak, Meg Johnson, Laura Grodin, Nandini Dhar, Jim Davis, Richard Robbins, Kenneth Pobo, Colin Sturdevant, and R.T. Castleberry.

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We present to you, dear readership, all manner of death and destruction, breakups and breakdowns, hook of rock and hank of hair. The orchards are swelling, the wolves are watching, and the city is haunted—everyone is waiting for you.

Click the cover to download Issue 8

Issue 8 Contributors: Leonard Kogan, Jill Khoury, Donna Vorreyer, Joy Ladin, Kristin LaTour, Meg Cowen, Paul David Adkins, Chauna Craig, Richard Leach, Leah Sewell, Alexandra Smyth, Aaron Counts, Gemma Cooper-Novack, Ellen McGrath Smith, Alexandra Quintanilla, Karen Locascio, Kathleen Kirk, Oshinn Reid, Angele Ellis, Valerie Loveland, Mary Stone Dockery, and Claire Zoghb.

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You will find in these pages the marginalized, the sick and scared, the small-voiced and the slightly deranged. Yet, make no mistake; the poems aren’t solely afflicted with loneliness and despair. There is hope here too, however quiet, however hidden, and it is worth the search.

Click the cover to download Issue 7

Issue 7 Contributors: Brett Stout, Danielle Ariano, Arlene Zide, Andrew Joron, Chris Suda, Jamie Grefe, Eleanor Leonne Bennett, Marcia Arrieta, Justin Robinson, Changming Yuan, Chris Crittenden, Lex Runciman, and Yvonne Zipter.

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Take heed: this issue of RCR is rank with doubt, which somehow manages to be simultaneously anxiety inducing and exciting. The poems you will find here are not the typical residents of Rufous City; they are the awkward and uncomfortable results of editorial uncertainty. 

Please find within these pages the act of functioning outside the comfort zone. Find a nervous toeing of the tide. Find a bit of dancing on the boundaries between here and there. It is slightly distressing to be in this liminal space, but the work has, as always, found a home here.

Click the cover to download Issue 6

Issue 6 Contributors: Anna Rose Welch, Eszter Takacs, Randolph Pfaff, Daniel Sinderson, Rich Ives, Grace Hobbs, Hannah Allen, Michael Milburn, Kevin Heaton, Jim Davis, Ray Hadley, Frank Rossini, Hilary Sideris, henry 7. reneau, jr., and Hannah Haas.

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This issue embodies the last frost before an earnest spring—the deconstruction of small beginnings and the cold that grows up quickly from the ground only to sink silently back in. These poems are unapologetic and imperfect, stretched tight and filled with fields of uprising and atmospheric disturbance, horses wearing gold masks and magic as long as train smoke. Each poem, in its own way, implies a strange, brief distance and it is there, between a collection of evenings and just a few minutes of rain, that you will find the truth of it all—despite the emptiness or the cold or the damage, something is budding here.

Click the cover to download Issue 5

Issue 5 Contributors: Matthew Vasiliauskas, David LaBountry, Kristina Marie Darling, Brad Dodson, Matthew Zanoni Muller, Justin Robinson, Deana Prock, Barry Spacks, Adam Hughes, and Theresa Williams.

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As the season turns to sleep, we present an issue filled with abrasions, conflicts, and the imperfections of a world just bordering on the unnatural. This is a place for swollen throats and ominous love tokens and bones buried next to salt licks. Some of these poems use brevity to imply encounters somehow flawed, unfulfilled, while other poems wander and refuse resolution. Either way, there is something clawing against silence...a desperation for understanding, perhaps, that propels these lyrics forward. May you embrace the anxiety.

Click the cover to download Issue 4

Issue 4 Contributors: Shannon Elizabeth Hardwick, Robert Vaughan, Chris Crittenden, James Valvis, Tina Barry, Marc Vincenz, Alicia Hoffman, Frank Rossini, Lyn Lifshin, Michael Lee Johnson, and Brandy McKenzie.

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This issue was an exercise in patience. The poems were slick, hard to come by, and seemed to shift like smoke over water, unable to settle. Even so, the songs are old and they seem to know their own burdens. Here memory is like thick perfume, cloying—a scented cover for panic. Things are disappearing, between these pages, and uncertainty is rife. It is easy to get lost, cloaked in dust, shadows of unreliable light between freight trains…

Click the cover to download Issue 3

Issue 3 Contributors: Mary Mackey. Tom Sheehan, Janet A. Baker, Amy MacLennan, Matt Kolbet, Howie Good, Alixa Doom, J.P. Dancing Bear, Bruce Lack, Beau Boudreaux, and Terry Brix.

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Here you will find the third installment of Rufous City Review, filled with smoke and sand, and at least a few birds between. Finding the right poems for these pages was a struggle, but slowly these winter months proved to provide some of the most wonderful examples of the music language can inspire.

Click the cover to download Issue 2

Issue 2 Contributors: Bonnie MacAllister, Scott Bailey, David Kowalczyk, William Doreski, M.E. Gallucci, James H Duncan, Richard Cambridge, Erika Lee Williams, Devreaux Baker, Felino A. Soriano, Bridget Gage-Dixon, and Ben Nardolilli.

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Included: a pink winter sky, a bookshelf practically new, and a moon like a porcelain boat, all “balanced in the murky sewer sea, green with sour” like we planned it. We didn’t, but that is the most exciting part. Find a home here, between Orchard Street and the arenas, if only for a second. That’s all we need.

Click the cover to download Issue 1

Issue 1 Contributors: Jeannine Hall Gailey, Troy Urquhart, Michelle Lin, Burgess Needle, Bill Gainer, Patric Nuttall, L. Ward Abel, Marilyn Kallet, Lucia Galloway, Millicent Borges Accardi, and Peggy Landsman.

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With our obsessions close at hand, a few optimistic ideas, and an immense amount of help we have built you a language metropolis; grandiloquent of us perhaps, but we like the view. Whether you find an escape or a new home or you pass right through and you never look back, welcome to Rufous City. Enjoy your stay.