Steve Paul, contributor to I-10 Review, 2025 Edition (photo by Jim Barcus)
An Assessment of I-70 Review, 2025 Edition
At one time, the category of literary journals would commonly be referred to as “little magazines” or just “the littles.” Therefore, one might not see them, even now, as crucial to the cause of free speech. I won’t inflict on you claims that poetry, for example, is inherently revolutionary, even if true. I will say that the littles in this country are hundreds, maybe thousands in number, each one asserting the core principle of free expression.
I-70 Review is such a journal, based in the Kansas City area. It made its 19th appearance in fall 2025, an event worth noting for the quality of the writing and for its affirmation of free expression in this country. I-70 is an independent — without support from an institution or MFA program. It is not overtly political, but literary writing seeks insights not always easy to assess at first, which takes attentiveness and care with words. In this I-70 issue, poet Al Maginnes, of North Carolina, wakes to the noise of wings over his roof and the awareness that “we remain uncertain about most / of what lives around us.” Awareness leads him to “the machines that grind awake each dawn… to make homeless the birds / that cross above.”
Read this as an environmental lament, if you choose, or as a poem about wakefulness, or purely as self-examination. The trouble some readers find with literature is its resistance to serving a single message. In a sonnet decidedly not focused on nature, Patricia Cleary Miller writes, “Geese head homeward, no one stops to stare.” This poem focuses elsewhere, on a woman’s life passages and her ongoing passions, especially in later years. “At last on impulse you kiss my bony hand,” she writes of a potential love. There, that “bony hand” becomes one great moment of courage and exposure. “As night falls it’s devotion that we claim,” says Miller. Her devotion lies with what endures, beyond mere “tangled limbs.” Yet she asks, “Can we still soar high?”
In an elegiac poem, “Ohio,” the eminently versatile writer Steve Paul, of Kansas City, alludes to the year everyone of my own generation will recall, during protests against our war in Vietnam, when Ohio, Paul writes, “became metaphor for horrible deaths, not yours yet, but four / immortalized by an image of a suffering woman / crying out beside the body of one of the fallen.” Tellingly of the art form, Paul alludes to the historic event indirectly. The phrase “not yours yet” addresses a specific friend in the poem but also resonates with many of us today, with armed soldiers showing up on our streets.
As I type that excerpt of tear gas and loss, I am driven back and forward at once, aware how the horror of that 1970 news photo and actions by Ohio National Guard troops at Kent State changed the country and should serve us now by example. Paul’s “Ohio” is a personal poem that cannot be extricated from its national and historical context. That poem, like Miller’s poem and others in the journal, asserts passions in different versions, including laments for what can be lost if artists are not free to say what is necessary.
Take a moment to consider that phrase “what is necessary.” Take it to mean not only what is necessary but in the way that is necessary. As the esteemed John Knoepfle once wrote of the poet Cesar Vallejo, art “is a way of making disparate things live with each other.” In this issue of “I-70 Review,” then, “The past / drags its bed of nails,” from Alison Stone. “You are shared heartbeat and home base,” Megan Stolz gives us. By using language to express emotion, Eva Skrande sees the tired of this world “hunched over like lampposts,” and notices how “The water of the lost is holy.” Surely, we are made to feel something deep and complex, as with Vallejo, himself, whose “stone walks crouched over in the soul.”
Some esteemed literary journals in recent years have become class projects, so universities can cut back professional editors. Some journals are ideologically based, with more interest in the message than literature’s “intrinsic qualities,” as Christian Lorentzen puts it in a recent issue of the journal Granta — in an essay reprinted in “The Best American Essays 2025.” Lorentzen means fresh use of language, structural integrity, outwardness, style and wit, like that.
“Narcissism governs the contemporary stance toward art as well,” writes Matthew Denton-Edmundson in the journal Liberties — also reprinted in “The Best American Essays 2025.” “Instead of going to it in the fearful hope that art will trouble us out of ourselves — confront us with genuine difference, and therefore make us different — we insist that it affirm us.” Overt, clear political and cultural editorials, or comedic jabs at the power elite have their place, crucially, in a nation’s discourse.
So does literary art.
I-70 core editors Greg Field, Gary Lechliter and Maryfrances Wagner, of Missouri and Kansas, are veterans of literary service and hold ground for literature’s unqualified — or as Keats would say, “disinterested” — search for truth. Keats means with subject and point of view wide open. My former magazine, New Letters, also is such a journal, with a multitude of others. Seek out those journals and evaluate publications by literary criteria.
For more information about I-70 review, visit i70review.fieldinfoserv.com.
