Iota Arrives!

The new issue of Iota, 83/84 arrived this morning, along with a complementary copy of Maggie O'Dwyer's pamphlet, Yes, I'd Love to Dance. Maggie's work I knew from the Thornfield's Poet anthology that I got last year from Salmon. It's a lovely pocket-sized booklet, one that is eminently portable and covetable.

Anyway, Iota itself is really very good, under the new management of Nigel McLoughlin and an editorial board from the University of Gloucester, and an interesting development is that they "will publish an Autumn Iota with fiction and non fiction from both new and established authors." That Iota looks and reads so well, is down to the production values of Templar, under whose auspices Iota is now published. It looks like they've taken the original idea behind Iota, of combining the better known with the newly emerging, and really run with it.

I was pleased to see poetry from Rob MacKenzie as well as poetry from John Dillon, with whom I worked last year on the MA at QUB. Boy, did I like those poems then and I really enjoyed seeing them as polished as they are now. John's at Harvard at present, but I hope he'll make it over to Europe as his career develops.

Iota - New Year, New Ways

Iota magazine changed hands across the summer and is about to be relaunched with a bumper issue 83/84. Overall editor is Nigel McLoughlin, (his fourth collection is Dissonances which I mentioned here before).

Iota are also launching a major poetry competition with Tim Turnbull as judge

The details are as follows:

Closing date is 30th November 2009

1st Prize £2000
2nd Prize £1000
3rd Prize £500
+ ten supplementary prizes.

Now, doesn't that sound pretty cool? Go and visit Iota's new website, and for goodness sake take out a subscription: I reckon it'll be well worth it!