summer/autumn 2016
It’s true–maybe the world doesn’t really need poetry. Maybe we need machines that clean trash out of ocean waters. Maybe we need police officers to enroll in mindfulness seminars. Maybe we need carrot muffins and more free preschool programs. But there’s still part of me that believes in poetry as a way to sustain the […]
autumn/winter 2015-16
Socheata San writes that “the morning air rouses all objects from their own weight,” and, in the same way, the poems in this latest edition of Chaparral rouse life and vigor from its readers. We find ourselves being made again and again under the weight of these poems. From “the tinfoil stars” that we gaze […]
autumn/winter 2014-15
We’ve been warned. We’ve been warned by Magdalawit Makonnen, in her stunning poem “Ricochet,” that the act of writing is as disarming as it is clarifying. The poems in this edition of Chaparral explore topics with immeasurable charm. From Julio Quezada’s “Sunday morning falling between bed sheets of precarious strangers” to Glen Collins’ “webs of […]
summer 2014
Welcome to the long awaited edition of Chaparral–featuring an interview with Douglas Kearney and new work from talented newcomers, such as Nikolai Garcia and Trista Payte. Whether it’s Antoinette Vawter’s haunting pantoum or Florence Weinberger’s, “The Dream Inside Out,” in which Wanda Coleman makes an appearance–each poem is an inquiry, an investigation, a language, and […]
summer 2013
The new Summer edition features a handpicked lineup selected by Chaparral’s new Assistant Editors: Freddy Garcia and Itiola Stephanie Jones. We’re also thrilled to showcase brand new interviews with LA poets Amy Gerstler and Lynne Thompson, as well as stunning new poems by Santa Fe’s Jenny George and Albuquerque’s Kathryne Lim. It’s a jam packed […]
autumn/winter 2012-2013
The latest issue of Chaparral features a knock-out lineup of vital new voices. These young writers are exploring all the ways the sacred makes itself known in the details of each day. Skin color and menstruation, slick black streets, an orphan “held tight by wind.” The speaker in “Dress” is sweeping “broken glass, gorgeous arguments” […]
summer 2012
Pinafores and laundry blowing on a line. Chinese food and Ocean Avenue. A voice like a broken record player. A Father’s shadow growing large as a house. Welcome to the imagined world—where the everyday stuff of life is rearranged, pieced out, zoomed in on, so that we might be able to see a little more […]
autumn /winter 2011-2012
Welcome to Chaparral! We’re thrilled to feature new poems by Los Angeles icon Wanda Coleman. For over thirty years, Coleman has been publishing poetry described as “prescient,” “darkly humorous,” and “iconoclastic.” These new pieces do not disappoint. The issue also features work by LA poets Alejandro Escude and Michelle Bitting, among other local new voices. […]
spring/summer 2011
The poems in this issue of Chaparral center around betrayal and politics, marriage and race, and the earth’s very terrain. They are poems of the world. And they leave nothing out: not the pain, not the ecstasy, not the loving and the dying. It’s the risk and innovation and craft that allow the world come […]
autumn/winter 2010-2011
Aptitude tests, a creaking storm, the deep mist, baked goods, insects…there’s something haunting in the new edition of Chaparral. Not that these writings are filled with ghosts or supernatural beings, but rather the speakers are obsessed with a lingering spirit—a memory, moment, or single image. And like most hauntings, these works lead us to where […]
summer 2010
“The ocean, I am thinking about the poor massive ocean…” writes Athena Fliakos in “Confessions Of a Beautiful Little Fool.” In fact, many of the writers in Chaparral’s summer issue are thinking of the ocean. For these writers, the ocean is a place where the simple act of change makes a kind of beautiful music. […]
spring 2010
The poems in the new issue of Chaparral celebrate the simple fact of spring. Life continues to regenerate. There’s no sentimentality in this fact—the poems here merely catalog the details: a creeping showy evening primrose, a newborn’s lips seeking milk, a lost mother re-imagined as an angel “rising above Crenshaw.” And it’s the art of […]
autumn/winter 2009-2010
Bats, rats, a loaded nine millimeter, love lost, outer space, the hardened earth, high wind—there’s a sense of violence and tenacity in the Fall/Winter issue of Chaparral. The new issue features work by some of Southern California’s most interesting voices—work that tears and burns and conveys a starkness, a hard-won resilience, a landscape re-imagined and renewed.
summer 2009
Welcome to the summer noir issue of Chaparral. Atmospheric, elegiac, and always courting mystery, the writings featured here are redefining this LA trope in new ways.
spring 2009
All the writers featured in this first issue live and write in Southern California, and we hope the work here represents the range, terrain, and virtuosity of this varied and surreal landscape we call LA.