Battersea Press Release: A New Source of Poetic Energy

Press release: The Battersea Review: for immediate release

The staff:

Publisher and Managing Editor: Umit Singh Dhuga
Contributing Editors: Ben Mazer, Philip Nikolayev, Todd Swift (UK), Jeet Thayil (India)
Art Director: Drew Vanderveen

Editorial Offices: USA

Editorial and Business Contact: email Umit Singh Dhuga at usd2001@caa.columbia.edu

The magazine will appear quarterly, in both online and print formats. The first issue will debut on the Battersea Review website, http://thebatterseareview.com/ ; on June 1. The print version of Vol. 1, No. 1 will appear in September.

Submissions are rolling, i.e. read continuously, as we are a quarterly.
Exceptional criticism or prose is especially desired.

There are two versions of the cover floating around facebook. The one that includes Todd Swift's name (the one that appears most recently on my own wall) is the most recent one, but three names are yet to be added to the cover: Greg Delanty, Anna Razumnaya, David Meltzer.

Contributors include: Ben Mazer (the entirety of 'The King'), Philip Nikolayev ('Juvenilia'), Stephen Sturgeon, Gerard Malanga, Todd Swift, Katia Kapovich, Jeet Thayil, John Hennessy, Stephen Burt, Joe Green, Robert Archambeau, Greg Delanty, David Meltzer, Ailbhe Darcy, Kathleen Rooney, Ernest Hilbert, Matthew Silverman, Mark Schorr, Unpublished Weldon Kees, edited and introduced by James Reidel, Nora Delaney on Archie Burnett's Philip Larkin, Mario Murgia on translating Ariosto, and Anna Razumnaya on the interrogation of Mandelstam and 'The Stalin Epigram'.

Editorial Policy: The Battersea Review seeks especially gifted poets and people who can write first rate critical essays. We may at times be looking for critical essays on particular topics or written in a diversity of modes. 1940s poetry or poets could be a topic of particular interest. Any really brilliant essay analysing first rate poetry to a greater degree of precision and complexity and definition than one would ordinarily find in a contemporary literary essay would be highly suitable to our pages. We are hoping for a revival of first rate criticism, and that Empson for example would be familiar reading to the serious critic. We want aesthetic criticism, and we want philosophical criticism. Historical criticism is also of interest. We also want material from the past, biographical essays that are original and cover uncharted territory, works in various forms such as letters or interviews or transcriptions, first rate verse drama, essays about first rate contemporary poets, and of course exceptional poetry. Brilliant hairbrained schemes are always acceptable. Oh, and topics of especial interest are (in no particular order) Keith Douglas, Henry Reed, poets of the 1940s, Donald Davie, Empson, Richards, A. S. Eddington, the Order of the Golden Dawn, Yeats, Beckett, T. S. Eliot, Hart Crane, Robert Lowell, Robert Graves, Dylan Thomas, aesthetics, classical poetry, Indian poetry, Scottish and Welsh poetry, British cinema of the 1940s, the BBC radio, The Criterion, Encounter, poetry of earlier periods, essays about distribution and communication in the modern period, essays about distribution and communication in the cold war period, royalty, the Anglican church, Rome, and espionage. This is not a complete list, but only meant to be suggestive. We are not looking for prose that is blatantly academic, except where it suits some dignified purpose.