Nightingale & Sparrow

Category: N&S Press

  • 2020 Full-Length Longlist

    This past spring, N&S opened for full-length manuscript submissions. Despite the chaos across the globe, we were thrilled to receive thousands of pages of poetry and other genres to consider for 2020-2021 publication.

    We are so grateful to each and every author who sent in their work—compiling this list was made incredibly difficult by the quality of each and every manuscript. With every batch of submissions we receive, we’re faced with the inevitable heartbreak of having to turn away work that speaks to us. We truly wish we could accept all of the below titles and more!

    As always, manuscripts were reviewed without identifying information, so it was especially exciting to find that a few of our former contributors were the authors behind these works—and even more so to discover several names that are entirely new to us here at N&S!

    From the following manuscripts, we’ll create our shortlist of full-lengths before choosing our final selections, which will be published by Nightingale & Sparrow Press through 2021.

    The Longlist

    Ave Mater Militantis – Sarra Culleno

    cups in the cupboard – Clarissa R. Sutton

    I Hear Your Music Playing Night and Day – Dave O’Leary

    In Between Places: A Memoir in Essays – Lucy Bryan

    Lamplight in the Fog – Daniel Mark Patterson

    Larkspur Queen and Other Songs – Megan Leonard

    Life is But a Moment in Time – Essie Dee

    Mark. – Shannon Frost Greenstein

    Maybe Birds Would Carry It Away – Christopher Woods

    Mothership – Emily Uduwana

    Open Zero – Sophia Naz

    Out of Time – Aiden Heung

    River Ghosts – Merril D. Smith

    Sea Me – Adwaita Das

    STRANGERS IN LOVE – Rebecca Ruth Gould

    Thirty Years – David Hay

    Too Much World, Not Enough Chocolate – Peggy Landsman

    Uproot the Hobbling Magic – Hibah Shabkhez

    We Could Be Lovers – Kim Malinowski

    We Will Meet the Sun Again – Kevin A. Risner

  • ephemeral by Samantha Rose

    ephemeral
    by Samantha Rose

    Publication Date: 10 November 2020
    Nightingale & Sparrow Press
    10 Pages

    Genre: Poetry

    Have you ever longed for something you could never touch? Have you ever touched something you knew you’d never hold?

    Sometimes it can feel as though being in the world consists of nothing more than passively watching people pass through from behind a glass wall, coming and going too quickly for us to fully realize the gravity of their presence. Life can also be described as a seemingly infinite series of moments woven together by the dizzying hand of time, and getting stuck in the details is somehow always easier than seeing the big picture. Seeing the big picture almost never occurs unless through the 20/20 vision that is hindsight.

    And in those moments when you did manage to hold onto something, is the time we have with that thing, that dream, that person, ever enough?

    I wrote this book on the premise that the answer to that last question is always “no.” The tragedy of existence is that the time we have in this lifetime will never be enough. Time is fleeting, and so are love and loss. Ephemeral is my attempt to explore themes of love, longing, loneliness, and endings, while a the same time, memorializing them. Everything is ephemeral – even this book – and we must remember not to miss the love in front of us, while also coming to terms with the fact that nothing – the good or the bad – lasts forever.

    This tiny book contains ten short poems and measures approximately 2.125 x 2.75 inches. Each book is handmade and numbered, representing its place in the limited 100-copy run.

    Each copy is uniquely hand-crafted/folded; because of this, some uneven edges do occur. We think it gives them more character!

    Print | PDF | Kindle

    About the Author

    Samantha Rose has a BA in sociology and philosophy from George Fox University and resides in Portland, OR with her cat, Tuna. Unsurprisingly, she often writes about topics surrounding existence and meaning, sociopolitical criticisms, and the beautiful complexity of human relationships. Her work has been featured in journals such as Feminine Collective, Quail Bell, and Mojave He[art] Review. She enjoys art of all forms, and you can often find her painting with coffee when she’s not drinking it with her nose in a book

    Blog | Twitter

  • Heal My Way Home by Rachel Tanner

    Heal My Way Home
    by Rachel Tanner

    Publication Date: 27 October 2020
    Nightingale & Sparrow Press

    Genre: Poetry

     

    Heal My Way Home explores mental health issues and physical health issues in the context of everyday life. The topics (ranging from buying jewelry to letting cats be in a wedding party) weave in and out of broader themes of illness and healing, just as life continues in and around chronic illness.

    Print | PDF | Kindle

    Previously Published Pieces:

    Take a sneak peek at some of the poems included in this chapbook: 

    About the Author

    rachel-tanner

    Rachel Tanner’s work has recently appeared in Barren Magazine, Moonchild Magazine, Porridge Mag, and elsewhere. She lives in Alabama with her two cats, Samson and Cady. Writing bios makes her nervous.

    Website | Twitter

  • Queer Girl Falls by Lannie Stabile

    Queer Girl Falls
    by Lannie Stabile

    Publication Date: 22 September 2020
    Nightingale & Sparrow Press
    10 Pages

    Genre: Poetry

    Queer Girl Falls is a brief but vivid story about a young girl discovering hunger. It starts with a scramble to name the pangs in her maturing body and ends in the confident swallow of a personal truth.

    This tiny book contains ten short poems and measures approximately 2.125 x 2.75 inches. Each book is handmade and numbered, representing its place in the limited 100-copy run.

    Each copy is uniquely hand-crafted/folded; because of this, some uneven edges do occur. We think it gives them more character!

    Print | PDF | Kindle

    About the Author

    Noa Covo

    Lannie Stabile (she/her), a queer Detroiter, often says while some write like a turtleneck sweater, she writes like a Hawaiian shirt. A finalist for the 2019/2020 Glass Chapbook Series and semifinalist for the Button  Poetry 2018 Chapbook Contest, Lannie’s first published collection, Little Masticated Darlings is now out with Wild Pressed Books. Individual works are published/forthcoming in Entropy, Pidgeonholes, Glass Poetry, Okay Donkey, and more. Lannie currently holds the position of Managing Editor at Barren Magazine and is a member of the MMPR Collective. She is a Best of the Net and Pushcart Prize nominee.

    Website | Twitter

  • All the Shades of Grief by Ellora Sutton

    All the Shades of Grief
    by Ellora Sutton

    Publication Date: 8 September 2020
    Nightingale & Sparrow Press

    Genre: Poetry

    Borrowing from nature, art, mythology, and personal memory, All the Shades of Grief represents an attempt to articulate the universal language of loss. From the death of a loved one to watching flying ants dying on the pavement, each poem in this chapbook seeks to confront grief and force it into the light as something we must all experience and exorcise.

    Some of the poems refer directly to the personally seismic event of the death of the poet’s mother, such as an honest rehashing of ‘The Five Stages of Grief’. Others deal with grief and loss in a more ‘everyday’ way, trying to encompass all the myriad shapes (or ‘shades’) of grief that we go through, the kind that can creep up and breathe down your neck with no warning whatsoever, the reverberations that never quite go away. Poems such as ‘Apollo and Hyacinth’ and the first-place prize-winning ‘Daphne’ translate death and loss from ancient mythology to modern-day relevance. This book doesn’t seek to tell you that everything will be alright, that the pain will go away – rather, it wants to hold your hand and feel it all right beside you, to whisper in your ear that you are not alone.

    All the Shades of Grief is part coping-mechanism, part moonlit-wondering, and a whole heart, trying to heal itself.

    Print | PDF | Kindle

    Zoom Launch

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    From Ellora: “Please join me for an evening of poetry readings to christen my debut chapbook, All the Shades of Grief. There will be readings from poets Jack Cooper, Nadia Lines, and Kevin Kissane, as well as readings from All the Shades of Grief. I am so excited to share my first book with you all. Come and enjoy an evening of free poetry!”

    Tickets available here

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    Previously Published Pieces:

    Take a sneak peek at some of the poems included in this chapbook: 

    About the Author

    ellora-sutton

    Ellora Sutton is a Creative Writing MA student living and working in Hampshire, England. Her work has previously been published in Nightingale & Sparrow, The Cardiff Review, Poetry Birmingham Literary Journal, The Hellebore, Poetry News, Honey & Lime, and Eye Flash Poetry Journal, among others. She has been commended in the Winchester Poetry Prize and has been a winner of several Young Poets Network challenges. Her favourite things to write about include badass women, art, nature, and death. She only feels like herself when she’s writing.

    Twitter

  • An excerpt from All the Shades of Grief

    On the anniversary of Van Gogh’s death

    You, who wielded yellow not like a weapon
    but like a looking glass. Did you find it?
    The ochre on the inside of starry eyes,
    in the yawning mouths of terminal flowers,
    the hay in the buttery shade of cypress trees?

    You, who forged blue into an ocean of tiny suns,
    burning Paris back to itself on the wings of crows
    scouring away their heartfelt blacknesses and cawing
    in that moment, forever. The people in your paintings
    always have such heavy shoulders.

    It must have been unbearable.

    from All the Shades of Grief

  • Author Statement: All the Shades of Grief

    Dear Reader,

    As I sit here, looking out my window at ferns and nettles dancing in the British rain, it occurs to me for the first time that the publication of my debut chapbook is a somewhat bittersweet occasion. Sweet, of course, for the obvious reasons. Bitter, because the one person I want to share it with most will never get to read it. Allow me to use this space to tell you a bit about that person, that such a person once existed.

    My mother, Victoria Sutton, was a deeply remarkable woman. She was a teacher. She read me bedtime stories. She would write down the stories I told her, long before I fully understood what an author was. Every blouse she owned was purple. The only thing she could cook was spaghetti bolognaise. She took me to see a big Van Gogh exhibition in London. She showed me a beachfront in Italy where she fell in love once. She could always win something out of those arcade claw machines. She loved Peter Andre. She wrote I love you in the front of every book she ever bought me. Above all else she was unwaveringly and profoundly kind, a kindness of sorts that very few possess. Often, when I think of her now, I think of her before I knew her – as a teenager, charming her way across the US to visit James Dean’s grave; hiding a stranger from the police in the boot of her bright pink beetle; wearing bottle after bottle of Bodyshop perfume.

    There is no way of dressing this up. She died when I was fifteen, after four years of a cancer that was supposed to have killed her within weeks of diagnosis. Death is rarely a truly peaceful process. For those left behind there is a cacophony that births a tinnitus that never completely dissipates. The poems in All the Shades of Grief give form to my own personal tinnitus. They are not all about the death of my mother but rather they are all coloured by the background noise of that grief, as everything is and always will be for me.

    The result is, I hope, not intensely depressing but honest. And kind, like her.

    All my love,
    Ellora x

  • Bouquet of Fears by Noa Covo

    Bouquet of Fears
    by Noa Covo

    Publication Date: 28 July 2020
    Nightingale & Sparrow Press
    9 Pages

    Genre: Fiction

     

    This microchapbook bridges between nature and personal fears, creating a story in which the natural world is intricately tied with the emotional. It is composed of three small fiction pieces: Ocean, Bouquet of Fears, and There Used to be a Sea Here. Each piece contains nature, whether it is inside me, beside me, or around me, and explores fear, worry, and insecurity through the lenses of a force far more significant than myself.

    The consistency of nature is the backbone of this microchapbook, but it is not a work of stagnation, but rather one of human development. It is a work of slow, never ending personal growth, constant, and yet always improving, entwined with the tides, the seasonal blooms, and the slow formation of mountains.

    This tiny book contains three fiction pieces and measures approximately 2.125 x 2.75 inches. Each book is handmade and numbered, representing its place in the limited 100-copy run.

    Each copy is uniquely hand-crafted/folded; because of this, some uneven edges do occur. We think it gives them more character!

    Print | PDF | Kindle

    About the Author

    Noa Covo

    Noa Covo is a teenage writer and high school student. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming from Reckoning, a journal of environmental justice, Newfound’s Virtual Realities issue, and Rune Bear. She lives in Tel Aviv, Israel with her parents, two siblings, and a fat cat.

    Twitter

  • from “Ocean,” an excerpt from Bouquet of Fears

    from “Ocean”

    I was once taught that all life on Earth began in the ocean, and that, biologically, humans are seventy percent water. That means seventy percent of us is made of what used to be home.

    I think of the ocean hidden inside me,  tucked away in my cells, mixed with my sweat. I feel the tides in my pulse and the salt in my tears. I haven’t forgotten the ocean. I haven’t forgotten its depths.

    continued in Bouquet of Fears

  • Review of Bouquet of Fears by Noa Covo

    Review by DW McKinney

    Reading Bouquet of Fears is to stand barefoot on the edge of a seaside cliff, staring down the expanse before you as the waves gnaw at the ground beneath you. It is both a plaintive declaration of self and a tacit acknowledgement of the unknown. This microchapbook by Noa Covo is a piercing progression of self, mind, and history detailed in three short stories.

    “Ocean” reflects on the unnamed narrator’s primordial origins and the monsters that followed their ancestors from the ocean’s depths. These monsters don’t become flesh and bone but terrors that make “their way up from my stomach and nestle around my heart.” The story merges with “Bouquet of Fears,” another story that beautifully unravels the narrator’s fears. It’s unclear if these fears are the manifestation of the monsters in “Ocean,” but it doesn’t matter. They carry their own urgency. There’s a delightful power in the way that each fear blooms and is named—or plucked—into existence. The last story, “There Used to be a Sea Here,” brings the collection full circle. Where once the narrator emerged from the wet dark, they long to stand on the rocky shore of what one assumes is hope or wholeness, as they proclaim, “there used to be a sea here” —the monsters receded with the tides long ago and a new history carved within themselves.

    Covo writes with a sharp elegance that ensnares the reader. Her words carry us along on a journey that ends as it began, back at the sea, where we ebb and flow. And this is why Bouquet of Fears must be read again and again. There’s so much to uncover in the brief pages. The words need to rest on the reader’s tongue so that they can divine the salt, bitterness, and sweetness in each line.