Welcome to River & South Review!

River & South Review is a student-run literary journal. We seek new work by emerging writers of any age who have not gone on to a graduate writing degree. This may include undergraduates, writers without a formal education, and writers from other professions.

Read the Winter 2013 issue here.

Our next issue will be published Spring 2014. 

the poverty of philosophy by Howie Good

I waved a dollar out the window.

We brushed hands as he took it.

Thank you, he said. I said nothing,

just rolled my window up

and  waited with renewed impatience

for the light to change.

You know how it is,

I couldn’t help but doubt, at least a little,

the crudely lettered sign he held.

Then I remembered

that cavemen depicted running animals

by giving them eight legs.

Howie Good has been published in The New Verse News.

Helping a Football Player Write a Poem by Tim Suermondt

He insists on confessing “I’ve never gotten poems”

and he’s both surprised and pleased

when I tell him “Sometimes neither have I.”

I assure him no matter what poem we come up with

it will be better than anything I could do on the gridiron—

my Gale Sayers moves alive only in memory.

I suggest he be aggressive with the first line

and he writes ‘I am the Quarterback.’ Good, and in short

order we have a serviceable twenty line poem—

one able to withstand the image I failed to resist,

the guard and tackle opening a hole for the fullback

“You could drive a mack truck through.”

We print the poem out and he folds it in half, lifts

his arms skyward, turning and saying “Touchdown!”

Tim Suermondt is the author of two full-length collections: Trying to Help the Elephant Man Dance (The Backwaters Press, 2007 ) and Just Beautiful (New York Quarterly Books, 2010). He has published poems in Poetry, The Georgia Review, Prairie Schooner, Bellevue Literary Review, and elsewhere. After many years in Queens and Brooklyn, he has moved to Cambridge with his wife, the poet Pui Ying Wong.

Searching For Spring by Kathryn Jacobs

Still cold enough for gloves. So pushing through

the weeping willow curtains meant bamboo

hung segmented and winter-colored, chains

that swallowed something lumpy – strings of beads

or new-fed boas maybe. Walk-through ropes

of what would soon be willows, feathery,

but which looked more like pastel fingers now:

elongated, arthritic. Like a door

into a warmer universe, you pause,

imagining the shimmer on your face

and naked shoulders, woody grasses pierced

like flutes with birds to whistle them. The lumps

are solid though, like Ovid's pregnant tree –

and when you push through, nothing changes. March.

Kathryn Jacobs is a medievalist with two books, three chapbooks, no fellowships, no poets-in-residence, and no contest finalists of any kind.

Inheritance by Brad Garber

“Grab your drink.   Let’s go for a ride”

We walked down to the fishing boat
my dad and I, walleye and northern
ball-player doctor, runner attorney.

The sky was open and late slanting
small chop moving across the lake
we pulled away from the dock
the Evinrude leaving a plume behind.

Past “lily pad bay,” past the little island
across the ancient wakes of canoes
beaver dams, loons, the shallows
to the far side where the fish gut rock
was white with gull shit and bones…

until Dad cut the motor to trolling
speed along the bank, raised his glass

“This is where your Uncle Dick
and I spread Pops’s ashes. This was
his favorite place to fish.”

We took a drink of brandy in silence
and when I looked at the pained smile
of my father at the helm I saw a tear
as he passed the lesson of mortality
and the quiet fear of his own death
toward the bow of the boat like a baseball. 

Brad Garber has published poetry in Cream City Review, Alchemy, Fireweed, Uphook Press, Front Range Review, Sundog Lit, and elsewhere. He was nominated for a 2013 Pushcart Prize for his poem, “Where We May Be Found.”