Potomac Review will host a series of themed issues beginning with The Other, in Spring 2025, and, in Fall 2025, The Unseen.
We welcome poetry, short fiction, essays, and meditations on these topics.
- Submissions for “The Other” will be open July 1st – October 1st 2024.
- Submissions for “The Unseen” will be open Jan 1st – April 1st 2025.
Selected pieces will appear in Issue 76 (spring 2025) and Issue 77 (fall 2025).
Writers may interpret these themes in a myriad of ways. For inspiration, we offer excerpts from our recent editor’s note “A Reconciliatory Approach” accompanied by the stunning photography of Rochelle Cohen.
“The initial seed of inspiration brings with it restraint and empathy, humility, and gratitude for whomever is abroad, and the decision to share does not include the decision to disqualify, for the decision to share is by definition reconciliatory; the poet will never meet but even a small percentage of their readers.”
“Like othering, not seeing is also a choice. We are not the only ones who observe and perhaps even engage in forms of mimesis. Just as self implies other, the seen implicates the unseen. Much can be seen and understood, but there is an ever-vanishing horizon, and the other, and the unseen, call into this future.”
“Seeing and failure to see are literary matters, and while our themed issues will be capacious enough to allow for each writer’s vision—transgressive, disruptive, queer, representative of the animal turn in the Anthropocene—they will be defining enough to proscribe that vision into the form of a task, an aesthetic task, where literature is itself seen as a form of reconciliation that does not recognize otherness, difference, disfiguration, or boundaries except as an also-I where the unseen is that aspect of artistic creation that is ahead of its time, that reveals itself as what has not yet been seen. ”
- Submissions for “The Other” will be open July 1st – October 1st 2024.
- Submissions for “The Unseen” will be open Jan 1st – April 1st 2025.
Photographs by Rochelle Cohen
