ceremony and conduits

On September 17, 2025September 16, 2025 By l noelle mclaughlinIn booknotes, publicationsLeave a comment

Sometimes you read a request for submissions and just know you have found kindred spirits. Such was the case when I received the call for Volume 12, Number 1, The Braided Gift.

The ritual of ceremony has been on my mind since a recent conversation with a friend – a yoga teacher and musician returning from a journey to the Badlands. She encountered garnet in the mountains there, that stone that can resemble the seeds of a pomegranate. What is our fascination with stones? To me, it feels like they hold so much time inside. They are doorways into another dimension.

The Plumwood Mountain Journal is an Australian and International Journal of Poetry and Ecopoetics. Their most recent submission call was written by the issue’s esteemed guest editors: Shari Lynell, author of Foxstruck and Other Collisions and The Semiotics of Arrival, and Lucy Van, a poet listed for the Stella Prize and Mary Gilmore award. They quote Kimmerer: “You start to remember things you didn’t know you’d forgotten. Our elders say that ceremonies are the way we ‘remember to remember,’” (5).

May we all remember.

as summer scampers away

On August 29, 2025 By l noelle mclaughlinIn publicationsLeave a comment

New post up now at The Bookends Review.

Soundings

On June 13, 2025 By l noelle mclaughlinIn booknotes, publicationsLeave a comment

Soundings East is a beautiful and brave publication run by Salem State University Press. My piece “Psalm Ambulista” was accepted to be printed in the Spring 2025 issue (Soundings East Volume 47), but I had to pull out because I had just signed over first serial rights elsewhere. If you are looking for a good old fashioned literary magazine – full of varied, prescient and insightful voices – with just the right weight to hold in your hand, I highly recommend this imprint.

It starts off with Richard Hoffman’s heartbreaking essay, beginning with his personal memories of Mosab Abu Toha singing with him, and his confrontations with the narratives of warlords. It continues with Stephanie Saywell’s confrontations with self. It leaves us with Malak Mohammad Al-Hessi’s haunting photo of The Great Omari Mosque in Gaza.

I used to sell zines of mine in the local bookstores with staples in them and my journal scribbles photocopied in black and white at the library. Maybe to a fault, I tend to equate a certain polish with insincerity. This book looks good on a shelf, but its real beauty lies with the words inside.

Oxford defines sounding as the action or process of measuring the depth of the sea or other body of water. A fitting title for a fine publication.

every unknown wanderer

On April 9, 2025April 13, 2025 By l noelle mclaughlinIn booknotes, publications2 Comments

This past week the poet and novelist Ben Lerner spoke with the students of SUNY New Paltz about his work. Lerner is the poetry editor for Harpers, and the previous poetry editor for Critical Quarterly. He is also currently a professor at Brooklyn College, and has taught at The University of Pittsburgh and California College of the Arts. His latest book is The Lights (2023).

Lerner discussed, in his terms, “the dramas of repurposing language and recontextualizing language.” (1) I was first introduced to Lerner through his poetry book Angle of Yaw, published in 2006 by Copper Canyon Press. The “angle of yaw” is the angle between the direction of travel and the direction of wind, specifically the rotation around the vertical axis (picture shaking your head no).

Continue reading →

your hands were comets crossing

On March 11, 2025 By l noelle mclaughlinIn booknotes, publicationsLeave a comment

The North American Review has a great translation up of Macario Matus’ “Binnizá.” This world of ocelot grandparents and fish brothers is vivid and green, welcoming in the depths of New York’s midwinter grays. I had no idea there were so many different Indigenous languages spoken in Mexico.

In flamenco dance, the hand movements are referred to as floreo. These are what I pictured in reading the line “your hands were comets crossing.” The Spanish word “floreo” comes from the Latin word for flower, and – in fencing and music – means a flourish.

Continue reading →

Psalm Ambulista

On March 4, 2025March 18, 2025 By l noelle mclaughlinIn publications1 Comment

I used to spend a lot of time going to shows. My sister lived walking distance from Union Pool, an easy stroll or train ride to most of the venues we were all going to in that 2005-2012 or so time period.

TV on the Radio, Bardo Pond, Stars of the Lid, Brightblack Morning Light, Mogwai, Fursaxa, Hammock, Weird Owl, Zelienepole, Grouper, Holy Fuck, School of Seven Bells, Black Moth Super Rainbow, Fourtet, Panda Bear, Explosions in the Sky, PJ Harvey, Black Angels, Dead Meadow, Beach House, Lower Dens, Coco Rosie…music seemed much better back then. Le Poisson Rouge on Bleecker, the Brooklyn Masonic Temple, Music Hall of Williamsburgh, Prospect Park and Union Square Park.

Continue reading →