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South Dakota Review
Brian Bedard, General Editor
Penni Pearson, Poetry Editor
Box 111, University Exchange
Vermillion, SD 57069
Subscriptions: $18/year & $30/two
Simultaneous submissions OK if identified
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South Dakota Review is published quarterly at the University of South Dakota, in Vermillion.
South Dakota Review publishes unsolicited poetry, short stories, short-short stories and essays.
The short stories average 3000 words, the short-shorts 750, and the essays 2500. The longest short
stories are around 5000 words. The shortest short-shorts are 700 words. They publish personal
essays and critical essays about literature.
Poems in South Dakota Review vary in length, style and subject. The shortest poems are six or
seven lines, the longest are several pages. Most fit on one page.
There are more free verse than rhymed or metered poems but this may reflect more the types of
poems contemporary poets are writing than the journal’s preference for non-formal poems. Rarely,
if ever, are concrete or picture poems published. There is a mixture of lyric and narrative poems.
There are some prose poems but most are broken into lines. There are no poems with lines starting
several spaces from the left margin in the style of e.e. cummings or Lawrence Ferlinghetti.
The subject matter generally has a rural theme. In “Dead Cows,” Shannon Nolte is able to tie in a
socioeconomic conflict between the first and third-worlds, but poems set in exotic or far-off places
are not common. Direct references to the Middle East are framed in narration about barns and
insects. Jason Ranek describes a spider using Egyptian imagery in “Spider,” volume 37, number 1:
She was a drop of poison poised mid-air,
her body one suspended hieroglyph
on tiny wires: elegant, Egyptian
as a scarab beetle tangled in the silver strands
of mummy’s hair…
There are both high and low-diction poems, poems with much alliteration and internal rhyming and
poems with very little of these. In volume 34, number 4, Earl Coleman, combines earthy words and
images with high diction in “Foraging”:
I wormed my grimy fingers
Through letters of no credit,
Codicilled documents of trust,
All signatured with dummy corporation names
In bold caligraphy.
Poets whose poems appear in South Dakota Review have often had poetry published in other
journals.
Many of the poets are associated with universities. There are poets from South Dakota and there are
poets from outside South Dakota. Some, like David Evans, have published several collections of
poems and have been anthologized. Others have a limited publishing history.
In general, the quality of printed stories, essays and poems is high. —
Steven Lovett
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