EVERYBODY MUST GET STONED!
You can also buy Stoned from the distributor Small Press Distribution (SPD)
and on Amazon. We are awaiting your orders!
Praise for Stoned
Ross Barkan, NYTimes Magazine contributing writer, just included Stoned in his SubStack newsletter!
“The poet Maud Diamond is smitten with the much younger Russian, Kazimir, in this riotous send-up of New York bohemia in the bombed out, if lovely, 1970s and 1980s. Kazimir is an artist, theoretically brilliant but doomed by his own instability. Maud has two children from a prior marriage and an all-consuming love of pot. Kazimir, fond of grand gestures like luring a full-grown horse to her apartment, prefers vodka. Her children grow, resentfully, in the shadow of this loving, strange, and absurdly volatile relationship—Lily, as a teenager, turns to a phone sex line to make ends meet—and Hoffman, through Maud’s deadpan first person, keeps the reader locked into each new frenzied episode. Scattered among the novel’s pages are a variety of finely-cut comic gems (“When I was young I was horrified by Eleanor Roosevelt. I thought a woman had to be beautiful.”) and punchy asides that lend the novel its subtle force. The muck and blood of old New York are everywhere, and redemption through art is still somehow possible. Maud, through a windy snowfall, carries a four foot by five foot blank canvas from Pearl Paint (since shuttered). She is like “Odysseus tied to the mast,” now “pirouetting on the sidewalk, trying not to let the thing drag me off my course like sirens’ songs.” Soon she’ll meet another man. He’ll smile at her with “wintery” blue eyes. Another adventure is about to begin.”
Not in Poets & Writers! Last Chance
to enter the 17th Mudfish Poetry Prize judged by Deborah Landau with its extended deadline of October 1st. A unique contest in that each entry is passionately reviewed for inclusion in Mudfish 24 which, judging by the poems we’ve already received, will be a thrilling issue.
Please send at least 3 poems to us via Email or snail mail, pay on paypal or by check, and know that your poems will be read with immediate appreciation and skill.
Like putting your foot in a shoe store fluoroscope machine as a child. We see your poem to its bones.
COMING SOON, INDIVIDUAL POET SERIES
#18: Dear Yiddish, Richard J. Fein
#19: Death, Please Wait, Rochelle Jewel Shapiro
Thanks to all who attended! For pictures from the party, see three different pages on Facebook and on Instagram. And please note that the new deadline for the 17th Mudfish Poetry Prize Contest has been extended to October 1st. Your poems are being read with pleasure and care.
Box Turtle Press is thrilled to announce the publication of Jill Hoffman’s long-overdue EXCITING second novel, STONED, coming end of April! We welcome your pre-orders.
In Jill Hoffman’s irresistible Stoned, the poet Maud Diamond not only indulges in reefer madness in her Beresford bathroom, but takes a much younger live-in lover, a handsome Russian (would-be-famous) artist, to the horror of her precocious children. An explosive triangle, by turns hilarious and heartbreaking, brilliantly drawn with outsized characters worthy of Dickens, lavish imagery, and impeccable comedic timing. Hoffman has written a book so poignant and pleasurable, like a Crème Brûlée for the eyes, you’ll read it again and again. And yet for all its seeming decadence there is a purity here like a fawn running into the water.
Stephanie Emily Dickinson, Author of: Razor Wire Wilderness
Great with child to speak,
Mudfish 23 is finally put to bed!
‘You tell me,’ is the theme of Mudfish 23. Honesty, emotion, shock, subtlety, poems whose reverberant language and intensity awaken more poems in the reader’s mind. Poems that remind us of our own forgotten lives, that stick in our mind like burrs on a woolen sleeve.
Donald Hall, in A Carnival of Losses: Notes Nearing Ninety, writes: “Jill Hoffman, a painter and a poet and a fiction writer, edits a thick and handsome literary magazine called Mudfish.” Mary Florio in NewPages writes: Mudfish “marries poetry and art in a spellbinding series of verve and verse….The volume is so well-edited that one has difficulty celebrating any particular poet out of the entire collection.” In its generous layout, it is as if every poet is featured, and a story-teller.
Mudfish 1984 was the first slender issue, but has expanded to include fiction. Now Mudfish 23 presents Stephanie Emily Dickinson’s Lastness,celebrating the life and death of the poet Ted Jonathan, blurring the boundaries between prose and poetry, and fiction and nonfiction. Each work selected is a memorable experience, and each issue is a work of art.
Available Now!
“The poems in Paul Schaeffer’s first poetry collection, The Cruelties of Brooklyn, instruct us in how to mourn and endure our living and give us an occasion to follow a family line through its most valued asset: the voice of one who remembers and sings the memory of the lives of those now gone, those who loved him. And yet, Schaeffer does not dwell in sorrow and grief-‘life isn’t suffering…‘ at least not completely. There is joy here, too. ‘We are even ok with less than nothing/Even less contains a drop,’ I’m thankful Schaeffer tells us, ‘That drop nourishes us/We learn to love it so much.‘”
Curtis Bauer, Author of American Selfie
Mudfish Poetry Prize #17 Extended!
Judged by Deborah Landau
Contest deadline: October 1st, 2023
First Prize Winner is awarded $1,200 and publication in Mudfish 24
Two Honorable Mentions awarded publication
Click here for more details!
Join the Mudfish Workshop, now on Zoom!
Mudfish 22 has launched! Better than ever — our constant theme — is true once again.
Mudfish 22 is bursting with beautiful outrageous poems, lavish selections from diverse poets, and new art by up-and-coming New York-based artists. The readers include the judge of the Mudfish Poetry Prize, Erica Jong, the first prize winner from Kentucky, two honorable mentions from Canada and Texas, a new poet from London, the guest Art Editor, John Yau, and many others. Available through Barnes & Noble or via PayPal at mudfishmag@aol.com
Or, send checks to:
Box Turtle Press, 184 Franklin Street, Ground Floor, New York, NY, 10013
Mudfish 21 still available!
$20 + $3.50 shipping and handling
WAREHOUSE SALE!
Our storage room is jammed.
Our cartons are overflowing.
Here’s the deal:
The Epic is back!
3 book-length poems that rival the Odyssey. A $60 value for half price.
$30 for:
The Gates of Pearl by Jill Hoffman,
Notes for a Love Poem by Mary Du Passage
Conversations with the Horizon by E.J. Evans
*
Vilnius Diary by Anna Halberstadt and Single Woman by Dell Lemmon
2 masterpieces for the price of one. A $40 value for $20!
*
Buy Notes for a Love Poem by Mary Du Passage and get her first book, Marbles, for free.
*
Send checks to:
Box Turtle Press, 184 Franklin Street, Ground Floor, New York, NY, 10013;
or, pay by PayPal at mudfishmag@aol.com.
Be sure to specify which deal in the comments.
Warmest thanks to our poets, readers, and judges.
LATEST BOOKS
Books Available for Purchase!
The Gates of Pearl
MUDFISH INDIVIDUAL POET SERIES #11
MUDFISH INDIVIDUAL POET SERIES #10
MUDFISH 20
MUDFISH 19
