Overview

Tough Poets Review launches as a bold, print-only literary journal from Tough Poets Press, the acclaimed independent publisher devoted to rescuing lost voices and publishing fearless new work. The debut issue features an arresting lineup of writers and artists including novelist, playwright, nonfiction writer, and AIDS historian Sarah Schulman, celebrated poets Marvin Cohen and Elinor Nauen, debut novelists John Tottenham (Service, 2025), Alejandro Heredia (Loca, 2025) and Nini Berndt (There Are Reasons for This, 2025), performance artist Marcher Arrant, and Reclaim NYC artist-activists HOMESICK and Damian Bielak, along with new work from Vanessa Matic, J. D. Smith, Amy Soricelli, and others. Across 188 pages of poetry, fiction, essays, interviews, and visual art, the editors curate a publication that feels both timeless and urgently contemporary. Raw, inventive, and defiantly human, Tough Poets Review invites readers to slow down, to argue, and to rediscover the physical pleasures of print. Uncompromising in voice and vision, this first issue establishes Tough Poets Review as an essential forum for the literary outsider and the creative risk-taker-proof that independent publishing is alive, well, and gloriously unruly.

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Reviews

""Tough Poets Review unties its trademark knotted pencil and lets its poets run wild in exhibitions of joyous free-range poetry. A magazine to keep your eye on."" - Billy Collins, Poet Laureate of the United States (2001-2003), and Poet Laureate of New York State (2004-2006) ""Tough Poets Review feels like being surrounded by your most erudite, eccentric, forward-thinking artist friends-the kind of friends who question everything with intensity and whimsy in equal measure, and, in that process, open up new ways of thinking and being. Within its pages are flights of fancy and not-knowing that lead you to look at the world differently once you've put it down. And that is a rare and much cherished feat."" - Nihaarika Negi, interdisciplinary artist recognized at Sundance + WIF, Film Independent, the Venice Biennale, and the UK Arts Council; Berlinale Talent 2021; NewImages XR Festival award winner; and author of the graphic novel Hunger, which debuted at NYCC 2025 ""Tough Poets Review is revolting-in the best sense of that word. The writers, artists, and thinkers in this debut issue are rebels to their core. Their work is alternately funny, smart, unpredictable, and startlingly honest. Think of this as the antidote to the AI-curated echo chamber of nonsense at the heart of a civilization on life support. In a future (better) world, this will be a long-lived journal."" - Alan Bisbort, editor of PleaseKillMe.com; author of Hip, Bohemian, and Counterculture: History and Legacies from 1830 to the Present ""Tough Poets Review is wild. It's cool, nerdy, committed, rich with DIY lineages-an impressive labor of love on the part of its editors, whose curatorial skills shine through in this cultural cornucopia. I came for the poetry but stayed for the conversations, the stories, the photographs, and the quietly powerful synergies that animate the issue. I hope Tough Poets Review will run and run . . ."" - Dr. Rona Cran, Associate Professor in Twentieth-Century American Literature at the University of Birmingham; author of Collage in Twentieth-Century Art, Literature, and Culture: Joseph Cornell, William Burroughs, Frank O'Hara, and Bob Dylan ""Urgent as a secret and true as a good joke, the inaugural issue of Tough Poets Review announces the arrival of an impressive and irreverent new literary journal and suggests that subsequent issues are not to be missed."" - Kathleen Rooney, founding editor of Rose Metal Press, founding member of Poems While You Wait, and author of Man Overboard!

""Tough Poets Review is revolting-in the best sense of that word. The writers, artists, and thinkers in this debut issue are rebels to their core. Their work is alternately funny, smart, unpredictable, and startlingly honest. Think of this as the antidote to the AI-curated echo chamber of nonsense at the heart of a civilization on life support. In a future (better) world, this will be a long-lived journal."" - Alan Bisbort, editor of PleaseKillMe.com; author of Hip, Bohemian, and Counterculture: History and Legacies from 1830 to the Present ""Tough Poets Review is wild. It's cool, nerdy, committed, rich with DIY lineages-an impressive labor of love on the part of its editors, whose curatorial skills shine through in this cultural cornucopia. I came for the poetry but stayed for the conversations, the stories, the photographs, and the quietly powerful synergies that animate the issue. I hope Tough Poets Review will run and run . . ."" - Dr. Rona Cran, Associate Professor in Twentieth-Century American Literature at the University of Birmingham; author of Collage in Twentieth-Century Art, Literature, and Culture: Joseph Cornell, William Burroughs, Frank O'Hara, and Bob Dylan

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