Tough Poets Review 01

<p><strong style=background-color: rgba(0 0 0 0); color: rgba(0 0 0 1)><em>Tough Poets Review</em> </strong><span style=background-color: rgba(0 0 0 0); color: rgba(0 0 0 1)>launches as a bold print-only literary journal from Tough Poets Press the acclaimed independent publisher devoted to rescuing lost voices and publishing fearless new work.</span></p><p></p><p><span style=background-color: rgba(0 0 0 0); color: rgba(0 0 0 1)>The debut issue features an arresting lineup of writers and artists including novelist playwright nonfiction writer and AIDS historian Sarah Schulman celebrated poets Marvin Cohen and Elinor Nauen debut novelists John Tottenham (</span><em style=background-color: rgba(0 0 0 0); color: rgba(0 0 0 1)>Service</em><span style=background-color: rgba(0 0 0 0); color: rgba(0 0 0 1)> 2025) Alejandro Heredia (</span><em style=background-color: rgba(0 0 0 0); color: rgba(0 0 0 1)>Loca</em><span style=background-color: rgba(0 0 0 0); color: rgba(0 0 0 1)> 2025) and Nini Berndt (</span><em style=background-color: rgba(0 0 0 0); color: rgba(0 0 0 1)>There Are Reasons for This</em><span style=background-color: rgba(0 0 0 0); color: rgba(0 0 0 1)> 2025) performance artist Marcher Arrant and Reclaim NYC artist-activists HOMESICK and Damian Bielak along with new work from Vanessa Matic J. D. Smith Amy Soricelli and others.</span></p><p></p><p><span style=background-color: rgba(0 0 0 0); color: rgba(0 0 0 1)>Across 188 pages of poetry fiction essays interviews and visual art the editors curate a publication that feels both timeless and urgently contemporary. Raw inventive and defiantly human </span><em style=background-color: rgba(0 0 0 0); color: rgba(0 0 0 1)>Tough Poets Review</em><span style=background-color: rgba(0 0 0 0); color: rgba(0 0 0 1)> invites readers to slow down to argue and to rediscover the physical pleasures of print.</span></p><p></p><p><span style=background-color: rgba(0 0 0 0); color: rgba(0 0 0 1)>Uncompromising in voice and vision this first issue establishes </span><em style=background-color: rgba(0 0 0 0); color: rgba(0 0 0 1)>Tough Poets Review</em><span style=background-color: rgba(0 0 0 0); color: rgba(0 0 0 1)> as an essential forum for the literary outsider and the creative risk-taker-proof that independent publishing is alive well and gloriously unruly.</span></p>