Tag: poet

Friday Five: Karina Longo, editor of La Rotonde Review

‘I wanted to build a space that balanced curation with inclusion.’

Well over a century ago, the Parisian bistro Café de la Rotonde was well-known as a creative hub for artists like Pablo Picasso and Diego Rivera, and for fostering avant-garde art movements like dadaism and surrealism. By the 1920s it had become a popular hangout for expatriate American writers like Ernest Hemingway, Gertrude Stein, and F. Scott Fitzgerald, as well as French existentialists Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir, and other writers, philosophers, and intellectuals.

Karina Longo, editor-in-chief of La Rotonde Review

The bistro’s reputation as a catalyst for creativity inspired poet Karina Longo to bestow its name on her recently launched online poetry magazine. La Rotonde Review made its debut in January with an aim, as Karina explains on the magazine’s about page, “to offer a space where high-quality poetry is celebrated, and poets from all backgrounds are supported.” La Rotonde Review got off to a great start in January with its inaugural poem, “Salt,” by Joseph Fasano, and has been publishing fantastic work since. Soon, La Rotonde Review will publish its first anthology: a collection of poems connected to the theme of “dissolution,” which she discusses in more detail below.

Karina, who can be found on Twitter as @TheDarkestStar_, is a neurodivergent Brazilian-Italian poet based in Milan. She has been published in many impressive literary magazines, including Expat Press, Apocalypse Confidential, Eunoia Review, Eulogy Press, Some Words, Trampoline Poetry, Michigan City Review of Books, Dodo Eraser, HAWKEYE, Burning House Press, Blood + Honey, Be About It Press, Mythic Picnic, cataloguing poetry, Micromance Magazine, Resurrection Mag, Londemere Lit, and Prosetrics. She also has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize.

Read on to learn more about Karina and her lit mag.

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Allison Field Bell’s expansive and intimate poetry collection, ‘All That Blue’

‘… the word blue encompasses both the mental and physical spaces we inhabit.’

There’s something beautifully expansive about multi-genre writer Allison Field Bell‘s new poetry collection, All That Blue (now available from Finishing Line Press). The title itself evokes images of expansiveness: an unending dome of blue sky above, the glimmering cobalt of the ocean, the pristine turquoise of a county pond.

Juxtaposing these visions of expansiveness, though, are raw, intimate, and up-close expressions of life in all its messiness and unpredictability–the teeming life bubbling up from beneath. The 43 free-verse poems of All That Blue, Allison’s first collection of poetry, present this juxtaposition brilliantly.

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