Bear Review

In 2014, as if the Internet needed another literary journal, Brian Clifton and Marcus Myers decided to launch Bear Review. Each poets, Clifton and Myers readily admitted a bias toward concise, image- and language-driven pieces. They began the journal with a wide aesthetic spectrum in terms of preference, and they set out with the hope they might create an online space in which emerging talent might enter the larger poetic  conversation with established poets. Over the years, they have published quite a few outstanding emerging poets such as Chen Chen, Chelsea Dingman, Ruth Madievsky, Miguel Murphy, Justin Phillip Reed, Nomi Stone alongside established poets such as Hadara Bar-Nadav, Cynthia Cruz, Simeon Berry, Sean Thomas Daugherty, John Gallaher, Randall Mann, Wayne Miller, Simone Muench, Rusty Morrison, Eric Pankey, Carl Phillips, D.A. Powell, Lisa Russ Spaar, Monica Youn and others. Each issue until Volume 5, Issue 1 has featured photographs and art by critically acclaimed photographers and painters. For our most recent issue, however, we have changed our art focus to featuring a single visual artist, accompanied by an interview, which we will continue in each future issue; in 5.1, for example, we feature an interview and collages by poet John Gallaher, who, as John Ashbery did before him, finds poem-making analogous to collaging. In Volume 5, Issue 2, we will run photos of post-apocalyptic city- and landscapes created by Lori Nix and Kathleen Gerber. While Clifton pursue his PhD, a new team of editors have joined Marcus Myers on the masthead to maintain Bear Review as a vital online space for poems and micro prose: Haines Eason, Joni Lee, Andrew Reeves and Ruth Williams.