Suffolk Throws Launch for White Whale Review

Online literary journal The White Whale Review held its launch party in the Poetry Center of Suffolk's Mildred F. Sawyer library this past Thursday, February 5. The launch began at 6:30 p.m. with an address by Jim Cronin, a Suffolk alum as well as the Review's poetry editor. His dry, sarcastic preface was an accurate preview of the website's wit.

Poet Dan Murphy read first. Cronin introduced him wryly, saying, "He began to speak when he was six years old, smoke when he was eight, drink when he was fourteen, and read when he was twenty-one."

Murphy read a handful of poems. His poem "Seventeen Minutes at Newgrange, Ireland" is included in the magazine's debut volume. It is an observational poem about the sunlight in a prehistoric, megalithic tomb.

His "Organ Donor" was a clever homage to William Carlos Williams' famous poem "This is Just to Say." He aptly captured the original's soothing abstractness with the lines, "I am dead and must decay" and "Forgive them. They simply had to be the color blue."

Sumita Chakraborty was the next reader. Chakraborty is the assistant poetry editor for Boston University's AGNI magazine. She read an assortment of her work, including a poem titled "Entomology"-a description of an insect. "Fabled Eclogue" was inspired by a medical journal. About that, Chakraborty explained: "I was in a mood." Chakraborty has two poems featured in this volume of the WWR: "Allegory of Navigation with an Astrolabe" and "Danaus Plexippus."

The final poet to read was George Kalogeris. He is a humanities professor at both Boston University and Suffolk. AGNI, Ploughshares and the Harvard Review have all published his work.

Kalogeris also read a collection of his own poetry, as well as a piece by Russian poet Osip Mandelstam. His translation of Hugo Hofmannsthal's "Days, in Tersa Rima" is included in the premier WWR.

The final installment was a short story entitled "Summer" by Rachel Coye. Because Coye could not make the launch, the piece was read by fiction editor Randi Shapiro.

Although she did not read, Suffolk University's Jennifer Barber also had a poem in the magazine: "Lying Next to Me." Barber is a professor of English as well as the founding and current editor of Salamander literary magazine for the past 16 years.

You can check out the White Whale Review at whitewhalereview.com to read more work or learn about submitting. Their next deadline is loosely set for March 15th.