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Editorial Focus

Rattle  is a publication of the Rattle Foundation, and its mission is to promote the practice of poetry. 

Tips From the Editor

There are no dos and don’ts. We have room to be eclectic, and seek to represent the entire stylistic landscape. Formal poems, epic poems, lyric poems, narrative poems, surreal poems, prose poems, visual poems—it’s all poetry. The most important thing a poem can be is memorable. Does it lodge itself in your gut? Does it sing in there?

Contact Information

20 of The Best Poetry Magazines You Need to Read

Chris M. Arnone

The son of a librarian, Chris M. Arnone's love of books was as inevitable as gravity. He holds an MFA in Creative Writing from the University of Missouri - Kansas City. His novel, The Hermes Protocol, was published by Castle Bridge Media in 2023 and the next book in that series is due out in winter 2024. His work can also be found in Adelaide Literary Magazine and FEED Lit Mag. You can find him writing more books, poetry, and acting in Kansas City. You can also follow him on social media ( Facebook , Goodreads , Instagram , Twitter , website ).

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As any MFA student will tell you, there are an overwhelming number of literary journals out there. Most of them publish prose, art, and poetry. Even if we focus just on the journals and magazines that focus on poetry, there are a lot. It can take a lot of work to sift through them when deciding what to read. That’s why I’m here.

I referred to my copies of Best American Poetry and The Pushcart Prizes to help me select these, as well as my own spreadsheets I use for submissions and tracking. Some of these magazines focus entirely on poetry, while others publish a mix of poetry, fiction, nonfiction, and art. All of these publish really great poetry, much of it completely free to read.

So here they are, the 20 best poetry magazines you absolutely need to be reading.

Best Poetry Magazines Focused on Poetry

Dust poetry magazine.

Dustpoetry is a fairly new poetry magazine, founded in 2020 by Tara Wheeler, a poet and editor living in Cambridge, UK. The poems published here feel very modern, very in-this-moment, and are largely from unknown poets. This small-but-mighty magazine is one to keep an eye on.

Poetry can often be pretty heavy, exploring some of the biggest and most controversial issues in our world. Light aims to do something different: light verse. It’s like cozy poetry, and they’ve been publishing it since 1992.

Modern Poets Magazine

Another somewhat newcomer to the poetry scene is Modern Poets Magazine . As the name implies, their focus is on contemporary poetry. They’ve published both emerging and well-established poets and continue to do so on an ongoing basis with their online magazine.

ONE ART: a journal of poetry

Named after the poem by Elizabeth Bishop (I’m guessing since they don’t say outright, but it seems obvious), this new online magazine is another to emerge from the pandemic with some poetry aimed at brightening our days and exploring those deeper issues, too. I just love this newcomer.

Palette Poetry

I adore Palette Poetry ‘s mission to “create a nourishing and brave space for poetic voices.” I find the poetry they publish to be just that, bold and nourishing to the soul. That’s what poetry should be, after all. They’re also one of the few online magazines that pays writers for their work. Bonus!

Plume Magazine

While poetry is not generally as highbrow as some people believe, there is room for highbrow poetry out there. Plume Magazine is one of those spaces. That’s neither good nor bad, just a different sort of poetry that deserves space, too. And Plume is really good at finding those poets.

Poetry Daily

Poetry Daily is exactly what it sounds like: one poem each day. They have one of the biggest poetry websites on the planet, and they see it as their job to expose people to all of the wonderful poets that are flying under the radar. Read it every day. I guarantee you’ll find some poets you love.

Poetry Flash

Yes, their website is very Web 1.0, but the content is some of the best you’ll find for poetry. They publish not only great poetry, but reviews of poetry books, poet interviews, and news about the poetry world. Since 1972, Poetry Flash has been one of the absolute best poetry magazines.

Poetry Magazine

This is the big one. Seriously. Published by Poetry Foundation, this magazine dedicated to poetry comes from a great foundation dedicated to poetry. They’re one of the hardest to get published in because they get so many amazing submissions, so they get to pick the cream of the crop. Oh, and their website has loads of public domain poems to read, too.

If you talk to academic poets, Rattle always comes up high in the conversation of the best poetry magazines. They’re very picky with what they publish, and their track record of award-winners proves how good they are, including 15 Pulitzer Prize winners and 12 U.S. Poet Laureates. Rattle knows how to pick them.

The Rialto Magazine

Apparently the 80s were THE TIME for UK poetry magazines to get started. That’s when The Rialto took off. And they’ve been going pretty strong ever since, publishing regularly for nearly 40 years and paying a full-time staff. Those are both huge challenges in poetry, by the way. And their poetry is still some of the best out there.

Best Poetry Magazines That Publish Prose, Too

Based out of Boston University, AGNI has been around since 1972 and is consistently one of the top literary journals in the world. Nowadays, they publish two large printed journals each year and a steady stream of online content as well. And that stellar reputation is evident with each poem they decide to publish.

The American Poetry Review

The American Poetry Review has been around since 1972. Funny enough, despite the name, The American Poetry Review actually publishes literary prose and interviews as well. Nevertheless, poetry is the main focus, and that poetry is brilliant.

Foglifter Journal

Foglifter is another newer kid on the poetry magazine block, but one that I love for its dedication to LGBTQIA+ writers and readers. In addition to their journal, they’ve branched out as a publisher of other books, still with that same focus. And the poetry is absolutely amazing.

The elder statesjournal of this list has to be Granta . It was founded in 1889 at Cambridge University. I go to Granta when I want to know the pulse of the world more than the pulse of poetry. Maybe they aren’t as daring in form, but their content is powerful and addresses our world in ways that social or mass media cannot.

Harvard Review

Not to be confused with the Harvard Business Review, the Harvard Review has been around since 1992 as one of the best poetry magazines. They also publish fiction, nonfiction, art, and just announced a chapbook prize, too. This is another journal lauded by academic circles for its great work, and the poetry is indicative of why.

Lots of big-name literary journals publish poetry. Most of them, in fact. This journal, founded in 1981 at the University of Central Missouri, really hits it out of the park with its poetry. Their prose is good. Their poetry is what sets them apart from so many other journals, though. Truly one of the best.

Poetry London

This magazine emerged in the punk era of 1980s London, and still retains some of those roots. Even with the recent and really cool redesign of their print magazine, it still feels on the edge. And the poetry? Same. They also publish some prose now, but the focus is still poetry.

The Southern Review

Since 1935, The Southern Review has been a staple of Louisiana State University and the literary world. Despite their long history, they’ve remained aggressive with their poetry selections, keeping their pulse on contemporary and established poetry at the same time. This makes for a great mix.

Founded in 1985, Zyzzyva is based out of San Francisco and has always made that a core part of its identity. To that end, the poetry in their pages is always progressive and bold. If you want to find the bleeding edge of poetry and prose, look no further than the pages of Zyzzyva .

Now that I’ve given you SO MUCH to read, how else can you support the poetry community and magazines like these? Buy poetry books, of course. While much of this content is available for free, many of these magazines run on shoestring budgets. You can also buy their swag or just donate money.

Looking to submit to these great journals? Do your homework. I’ve linked to all of their websites, so look at their submission guidelines and windows. Every magazine is different, so take your time preparing each submission.

Happy National Poetry Month!

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Home  >  Resources  >  Rattle Poetry Book Reviews

Rattle Poetry Book Reviews

As of 2022, the widely distributed journal Rattle: Poetry for the 21st Century is open to insightful and entertaining reviews of contemporary poetry books for their monthly online column. Reviews should be at least 1,000 words and include actual analysis of the text. Accepted authors will receive $200.

Source: https://rattle.submittable.com/submit/245525/book-reviews

Categories: Reviews and Criticism

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Literary Magazines

The Big List of Literary Magazines

May 11, 2023 by Every Writer

http://www.rattle.com

From the Editor

Rattle’s mission is to promote the practice of poetry. We feel that poetry lost its way in the 20th century, becoming so obscure and esoteric that mainstream readers have forgotten how moving language alone can be. As a result, most people learn to find their feelings in music, movies, and novels, while poetry languishes on its lone shelf in the bookstores, waiting only for the occasional cameo at a university workshop. But it shouldn’t take a scholar to be moved by the written word—great literature has something to offer everyone. All our lives are compelling, full of joys and burdens and profound experiences we should be sharing—and poetry is the most intimate way to share it. When you read a poem, you become the medium; the poet speaks in your voice, paints the canvas of your inner eye. This connection is more direct than any other, and it doesn’t take a Hollywood budget to do it. Read the poems on Rattle.com for free. Write a poem on a napkin and share it with a friend. Keep a journal and send us a page. Participate. The pure love of language is one of the most important experiences in the history of human culture, and somehow most of us have forgotten about it. More than anything, our goal is to promote a community of active poets. That means we care as much about submitters as subscribers. Lawyers, landscapers, homemakers, and Pulitzer Prize winners are all treated the same—and we’ve published them all. Most literary magazines cite a percentage of content that comes from the “slush pile,” meaning work sent in unsolicited. In most cases this percentage is less than 50%, meaning more than half of the content was solicited, meaning you never had a chance. At Rattle, every poem we publish starts in our “slush pile,” and has to rise through the same process of careful consideration. We don’t ask for or publish the standard credit-listing bios; we don’t even read them. If we like your poem better than the Poet Laureate’s, we’ll publish yours. That’s what makes Rattle so readable. Being an active community of poets also means that we’re always looking for feedback, and that the editors will always be available through email and Facebook and Twitter and whatever interactive technology comes out next. There’s nothing special about us; there is no ivory tower, and no etiquette to worry about breaking. So tell us what you think. Rattle is published in several forms, in effort to find as many readers as possible, but the primary version has been our print issue, originally twice per year, but now appearing quarterly in March, June, September, and December. Each issue is roughly 100 pages of poetry, essays, and an interview with a contemporary poet. Summer and winter issues are open; spring and fall issues focus on a specific stylistic, ethnic, or vocational group. Recent tributes have focused on sonnets, African American poets, cowboy poets, visual poetry, and nurses. Every poem we’ve published has or will appear on Rattle.com as part of our daily blog, which features a poem every day, or, occasionally, relevant prose. Many of the poems include an audio clip of the poet reading their work. At Rattle, anything always goes. If a poem is accessible, interesting, moving, and memorable, if it makes you laugh or cry, then it’s the kind of poem that rattles around inside you for years, and it’s our kind of poem.

Submissions

Rattle publishes 150 poems each year, and we try to let them be as eclectic as possible. Long poems, short poems, free verse, formalism, slam—we’ll publish anything, as long as it’s musical, meaningful, and memorable. In addition to our regular issues, we also publish an annual anthology of young poets (age 15 or younger).

From the site: 

Thanks for sharing your work with  Rattle ! All of our content comes from unsolicited submissions—we couldn’t exist without you, and we want this process to be as easy and friendly as possible. For more information, see our  full guidelines page .

Tell us about upcoming events or contests

The annual Rattle Poetry Prize offers $15,000 for a single poem to be published in the winter issue of the magazine. Ten finalists will also receive $500 each and publication, and be eligible for the $5,000 Readers’ Choice Award, to be selected by subscriber and entrant vote. https://www.rattle.com/prize/about/

We’ve always loved chapbooks for their brevity and intensity. At a few dozen pages, a great chapbook is the perfect reading experience for the 21st century—not too long, not too short: They’re the Goldilocks zone of the poetry world. So we wanted to do for chapbooks what we’ve done for poems with the Rattle Poetry Prize https://www.rattle.com/chapbooks/prize/

Information

Editors Name Timothy Green Print publication? Yes Circulation 5,000 Do you take online submissions? Yes Submission Guidelines URL   Approx. Response Time? 1 – 3 months How often do you publish? Quarterly Year Founded? 1995 Do you pay? $50 and subscription

Twitter @RattleMag Mailing Address: Rattle 12411 Ventura Blvd Studio City, CA 91604 Email tim[at]rattle[dot]com Facebook https://www.facebook.com/RattleMagazine

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Rattle – Winter 2007

• February 27, 2008
• Magazine Reviews

Volume 13 Number 2

Winter 2007

This edition of Rattle includes a tribute to nurses that makes this issue worthwhile on its own. The nursing section has personal essays from poet-nurses, such as Courtney Davis, T.S. Davis, Anne Webster and Christine Wideman, describing how they became both writers and nurses, which role was dominate at what point in their lives, and how nursing feeds into their writing. They talk of the sensuousness of nursing, the essential selflessness and empathy nurses experience, and how that “otherness” affects their poetry. Courtney Davis wrote movingly about her favorite patient: “A few weeks after my patient died, not knowing what else to do, I dug out my old poetry notebook…” “Writing about her death, I felt a sudden, inexplicable joy…” “I had also, in the writing, let her go.”

In a touching poem subtitled “for Dan,” Geri Rosenzweig writes, “When at last / you find the street of the cellist, / may the dread / that accompanied you / fall by the way.” Only nurses close to life and death can write about it as in these selections, close to the pulse, with grace, and strength.

The first one hundred-odd pages include choice poetry, some of it dead-on hilarious, like Nathaniel Whittemore’s honorable mention-winning “You Never Know When You’re Gonna Live…” It begins, “Sarah was a chronic masturbater;” and becomes more inventive – and 99.9 percent G-rated – from there.

So many poems left me satisfied, feeling like these editors really know how to choose. Tom Holmes wrote with clever irony, “My Mouth (An Apology)”: “I left my mouth / hanging on the wall / With the front door / shut and locked.” “ Persephene Remembers: The Bed” by Alison Townsend will haunt you, and “Still Life” by Jessica Daigle Vidrine has universal implications for anyone who has left someone behind; there are too many other striking poets to mention. If a poetry lover doesn’t find this journal measuring up, nothing will. [ www.RATTLE.com ]

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Literary Magazine

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A publication of the Rattle Foundation, an independent 501(c)3 non-profit organization whose mission is to promote the practice of poetry, and is not affiliated with any other organization.

This listing is scheduled for audit

Please double check information on the magazine’s website

if you are an editor for this magazine , you can claim the listing here

• Vibe: Top-tier stuff. Not Paris Review, but ok

Find more details in the Genres section

Accepts simultaneous submissions

What's that?

When you can submit your work to multiple magazines at the same time

Accepts previously published

When the magazine wants to publish your previously published work. Requirements vary

Nominates for prizes

Active on social media

Available in print

Provides contributor copies

From the editors

yes, one-year subscription

Has examples online

Offers expedited response

Expedited submission: When the magazine offers a faster response time for an extra fee

Max pieces: 4

Payment: $ 200

No specific limitations

Max pieces: 3

How to submit

Submittable

Cover letter

No cover letter advice

Eligibility

No specific eligibility requirements

We don't have formatting requirements for this magazine

Author's rights

All rights revert to the authors upon publication. To get technical, we require First Rights, meaning we want to be the first publisher to present the poems to the public. Though authors do retain all rights to their work, we post everything we publish on the back-issues section of the website after print publication, and so require Non-Exclusive Electronic Rights.

Additional info

Active on social media Pays! Contributors in print receive $200/poem and a complimentary one-year subscription to the magazine. Online contributors receive $100/poem. Available in print! Accept work previously posted in blogs, message boards, or social media

The Submissions Grinder Statistics

12-month average acceptance rate

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Timothy Green

Megan Green

Assistant Editor

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BONE RATTLE

by Marc Cameron ‧ RELEASE DATE: April 27, 2021

Cameron’s energetic potboiler could draw readers in—or exhaust them.

A deputy U.S. marshal stationed in Alaska is challenged by a handful of serious cases and a complicated home life.

When a big archaeological dig grinds to an abrupt halt at the discovery of a rattle that could be worth half a million dollars, the handful of men on hand debate their next move, wary of upsetting their boss, Harold Grimsson, or his dangerous right-hand man, Dollarhyde. Grimsson, who owns the Valkyrie Mine Holdings, is on his private island south of Juneau being warned by two corrupt state senators that he’s in danger of being connected to the criminal Hernandez brothers, currently on trial for financial fraud. Little do the senators know that Grimsson murdered his first wife or that Dollarhyde killed the dig site employee who wanted to halt the operation. While all this is unfolding, Supervisory Deputy U.S. Marshals Arliss Cutter and Lola Teariki are hauling in some grittier perps. Their takedown of drug dealer Jarome Pringle and his stripper girlfriend blossoms into a tense chase and a major bust with several more arrests. Other cops deal with a body on a frigid gravel beach. Cutter’s home life is going through some growing pains. After four marriages, he’s now helping his late brother's widow, Mim, raise snarky twin teenagers and harboring sad memories from his past. Dollarhyde’s thirst for violence seems unquenchable. Cameron’s colorful procedural has epic scope; each change of setting seems to bring a new set of characters and a new subplot with its own wrinkles. Plot threads sprawl and tangle with the abandon of a soap opera. Until the tale settles down to focus on premier villain Grimsson, keeping it all straight is a challenge.

Pub Date: April 27, 2021

ISBN: 978-1-4967-3208-8

Page Count: 456

Publisher: Kensington

Review Posted Online: Feb. 9, 2021

Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2021

MYSTERY & DETECTIVE | SUSPENSE | POLICE PROCEDURALS | SUSPENSE | GENERAL MYSTERY & DETECTIVE | GENERAL THRILLER & SUSPENSE

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BOOK REVIEW

by Marc Cameron

A CONSPIRACY OF BONES

by Kathy Reichs ‧ RELEASE DATE: March 17, 2020

Forget about solving all these crimes; the signal triumph here is (spoiler) the heroine’s survival.

Another sweltering month in Charlotte, another boatload of mysteries past and present for overworked, overstressed forensic anthropologist Temperance Brennan.

A week after the night she chases but fails to catch a mysterious trespasser outside her town house, some unknown party texts Tempe four images of a corpse that looks as if it’s been chewed by wild hogs, because it has been. Showboat Medical Examiner Margot Heavner makes it clear that, breaking with her department’s earlier practice ( The Bone Collection , 2016, etc.), she has no intention of calling in Tempe as a consultant and promptly identifies the faceless body herself as that of a young Asian man. Nettled by several errors in Heavner’s analysis, and even more by her willingness to share the gory details at a press conference, Tempe launches her own investigation, which is not so much off the books as against the books. Heavner isn’t exactly mollified when Tempe, aided by retired police detective Skinny Slidell and a host of experts, puts a name to the dead man. But the hints of other crimes Tempe’s identification uncovers, particularly crimes against children, spur her on to redouble her efforts despite the new M.E.’s splenetic outbursts. Before he died, it seems, Felix Vodyanov was linked to a passenger ferry that sank in 1994, an even earlier U.S. government project to research biological agents that could control human behavior, the hinky spiritual retreat Sparkling Waters, the dark web site DeepUnder, and the disappearances of at least four schoolchildren, two of whom have also turned up dead. And why on earth was Vodyanov carrying Tempe’s own contact information? The mounting evidence of ever more and ever worse skulduggery will pull Tempe deeper and deeper down what even she sees as a rabbit hole before she confronts a ringleader implicated in “Drugs. Fraud. Breaking and entering. Arson. Kidnapping. How does attempted murder sound?”

Pub Date: March 17, 2020

ISBN: 978-1-9821-3888-2

Page Count: 352

Publisher: Scribner

Review Posted Online: Dec. 22, 2019

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2020

GENERAL MYSTERY & DETECTIVE | GENERAL THRILLER & SUSPENSE | MYSTERY & DETECTIVE | SUSPENSE | THRILLER | DETECTIVES & PRIVATE INVESTIGATORS | SUSPENSE | GENERAL & DOMESTIC THRILLER

More by Kathy Reichs

by Kathy Reichs

EVERYONE IN MY FAMILY HAS KILLED SOMEONE

by Benjamin Stevenson ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 17, 2023

This book and its author are cleverer than you and want you to know it.

In this mystery, the narrator constantly adds commentary on how the story is constructed.

In 1929, during the golden age of mysteries, a (real-life) writer named Ronald Knox published the “10 Commandments of Detective Fiction,” 10 rules that mystery writers should obey in order to “play fair.” When faced with his own mystery story, our narrator, an author named Ernest Cunningham who "write[s] books about how to write books," feels like he must follow these rules himself. The story seemingly begins on the night his brother Michael calls to ask him to help bury a body—and shows up with the body and a bag containing $267,000. Fast-forward three years, and Ernie’s family has gathered at a ski resort to celebrate Michael’s release from prison. The family dynamics are, to put it lightly, complicated—and that’s before a man shows up dead in the snow and Michael arrives with a coffin in a truck. When the local cop arrests Michael for the murder, things get even more complicated: There are more deaths; Michael tells a story about a coverup involving their father, who was part of a gang called the Sabers; and Ernie still has (most of) the money and isn’t sure whom to trust or what to do with it. Eventually, Ernie puts all the pieces together and gathers the (remaining) family members and various extras for the great denouement. As the plot develops, it becomes clear that there’s a pretty interesting mystery at the heart of this novel, but Stevenson’s postmodern style has Ernie constantly breaking the fourth wall to explain how the structure of his story meets the criteria for a successful detective story. Some readers are drawn to mysteries because they love the formula and logic—this one’s for them. If you like the slow, sometimes-creepy, sometimes-comforting unspooling of a good mystery, it might not be your cup of tea—though the ending, to be fair, is still something of a surprise.

Pub Date: Jan. 17, 2023

ISBN: 978-0-06-327902-5

Page Count: 384

Publisher: Mariner Books

Review Posted Online: Oct. 25, 2022

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2022

MYSTERY & DETECTIVE | DETECTIVES & PRIVATE INVESTIGATORS | GENERAL MYSTERY & DETECTIVE

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by Benjamin Stevenson

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BOOK REVIEW: Rattle by Fiona Cummins

Pan Macmillan February 2017 Paperback, $29.99 Reviewed by Steph O’Connell

Crime / Thriller

A psychopath more frightening than Hannibal Lecter. He has planned well. He leads two lives. In one he’s just like anyone else. But in the other he is the caretaker of his family’s macabre museum. Now the time has come to add to his collection. He is ready to feed his obsession, and he is on the hunt. Jakey Frith and Clara Foyle have something in common. They have what he needs. What begins is a terrifying cat-and-mouse game between the sinister collector, Jakey’s father and Etta Fitzroy, a troubled detective investigating a spate of abductions. Set in London’s Blackheath, Rattle by Fiona Cummins explores the seam of darkness that runs through us all; the struggle between light and shadow, redemption and revenge. It is a glimpse into the mind of a sinister psychopath. And it’s also a story about not giving up hope when it seems that all hope is already lost.

Cummins’ debut novel is a chilling look at stranger danger, in which not one but two children are swayed, in the duration of the narrative, by the words of a man they do not know. One believes him when he says simply, ‘Mummy asked me to walk you home. ‘Cos you don’t like the dark. OK?’ , and the other is eager to see the man’s made up dog, who is about to have puppies; the man was hoping the child might like to keep one.

It is a reminder that these discussions need to be had with children, that even if the person says they know their parents or offers them something they deeply desire, they should never go with strangers, and as such this is bound to be a chilling and at times uncomfortable story on many levels for anyone with children in their lives.

But beyond the stranger danger element, this is a study of people. The innocence of children; the strain put on a family when their child is born with a condition that will affect their life or the way people see them; the suffering when a child is lost, one way or another; and the upbringing that might lead one to believe that killing children is acceptable, and for the good of humankind.

It’s also a tale of resilience. The ways that those left behind keep going, must continue on in the hopes that their child might be found.

Why had no one warned how how difficult it was to sum up, in one photograph, the son she loved? Should she portray him as a laughing, carefree boy on his daddy’s shoulder, or sick and fragile, in a hospital bed? The public would search harder for a poorly child, Lilith decided.

The ways the investigation can put a certain additional strain on the families, even as it is needed.

She could read his outrage in the line of his lips, the fleck of spittle on his chin. She understood it, and would have been surprised by its absence. But Fitzroy had seen that expression before on other faces, on the faces of fathers who had raped and strangled their little girls.

How those children might make it through each day, holding on and not letting their situation destroy them.

She was starting to lose count of how long she’d been in this room that smelled of cabbage and a sweet, sickly scent she hadn’t come across before. Sometimes she cried, but mostly she talked to herself, muttered imaginings with her ‘pillow’ doll. They went on long journeys. To the beach near her old home. To the swimming pool with Gina on a Saturday morning.

‘My name’s Clara. I’m five-and-a-quarter.’ A pause. ‘Are you a goodie or a baddie?’ ‘A goodie.’ His voice was a scrape of wood against brick. ‘Like Spider-Man.’ ‘I like Spider-Man,’ she said, her own voice high and clear. ‘I wish you could spin a web. Then we could escape.’ A wobble. ‘I don’t like it here.’ ‘Me either,’ he said, as if talking through the wall to a little girl was the most natural thing in the world.

It’s at times hard to believe this is a debut novel, as the writing is engaging, observant, and deliciously gruesome, and Cummins is definitely a writer to look out for.

His eyes held hers, and in that frozen moment, she was reminded of her family’s elderly dog. He had died that summer after being eaten from the inside by maggots, an awful, prolonged death by fly strike. When she had found Buddy, still alive but in shock, his eyes had been empty. As empty as this man’s.

Early Thursday morning, he comes back. The butchered remains of the rabbit have already begun to give off a unique perfume and the Bone Collector knows it will ripen. He revels in its cloying scent, will later lick his own skin to see if he can taste it in the dead cells and follicles.

First, he will begin in the cutting room. He will peel back the boy’s skin, remove the organs, among them the brain and the tongue, and leave the remains to dry in the flat, still air of his father’s house. Then the beetles will finish the job, consuming the already decomposing flesh. They do not enjoy fresh meat.

When she is lost in her drugged sleep, he could flay the skin from her hands. He yearns to see those prehensile digits without their covering of tissues, the technicality of their grasp and pinch. He wants to study them at work, bone claws attached to living matter. He wants another first for his collection.

However, there were some things within this story that kept it from rocketing to the status of favourite title for this reader. 

Foremost among these problems was that, though the first child is snatched as early as page fifteen, and though the killer seems to have been raised into a very ritualized method to the way he kills, cleans, and mounts his subjects, he keeps “forgetting” about the girl, leaving her locked in her cell while he goes after the other child. Seemingly this choice was made in order to ramp up the tension, and to give the police a better chance of finding the killer before either of the children could be turned into one of his exhibits, but in terms of a methodical, trained serial killer with a set of rules he must follow, this doesn’t make much sense at all.

There was also the occasional hint at something “other” going on, but which was never fully explored, and never really eventuated into anything, making this reader wonder why it was even included. Perhaps it was meant as a red herring, perhaps it was something further in the exploration of people, but it seemed not to match up with the rest of the text, and felt like an oversight by the author.

The story itself was not particularly unique or unpredictable, but the writing itself made for an engrossing read, and Fiona Cummins has taken up residence on this reviewer’s list of must read authors.

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Revolusi , by David Van Reybrouck (Norton) . This powerful account of the colonization of Indonesia takes the form of a people’s history, using interviews with those who lived under—and sometimes defied—Dutch rule. Van Reybrouck, a Belgian historian best known for his work about the Democratic Republic of the Congo, shows how the Dutch relied on genocide and slavery to piece together the Indonesian “jigsaw puzzle.” As one colonist put it, “Trade cannot be maintained without war, nor war without trade.” Van Reybrouck also captures the hope that independence brought, showing how, before a U.S.-sponsored dictatorship ushered in a “crazed explosion of violence,” Indonesians’ fight against oppression inspired other nations to break free.

Women and the Piano , by Susan Tomes (Yale) . In this engaging survey of fifty female pianists, from the eighteenth century to the present, Tomes aims to correct a male-centric understanding of piano history. Women pianists have long been scrutinized—for playing in a “masculine” style, for their appearances, for not orienting themselves around family. Through short biographies, Tomes documents the cost of pursuing art. Fanny Mendelssohn allowed her compositions to be published under her brother Felix’s name; Zhu Xiao-Mei continued studying Bach even after being sent to do manual labor during China’s Cultural Revolution. Yet the resounding note is one of passion. As Marguerite Long told her students, “My joy in life is work, because it will never betray you.”

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Scientists Find an ‘Alphabet’ in Whale Songs

Sperm whales rattle off pulses of clicks while swimming together, raising the possibility that they’re communicating in a complex language.

Credit... Amanda Cotton

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By Carl Zimmer

• May 7, 2024

Ever since the discovery of whale songs almost 60 years ago, scientists have been trying to decipher their lyrics. Are the animals producing complex messages akin to human language ? Or sharing simpler pieces of information, like dancing bees do? Or are they communicating something else we don’t yet understand?

In 2020, a team of marine biologists and computer scientists joined forces to analyze the click-clacking songs of sperm whales, the gray, block-shaped leviathans that swim in most of the world’s oceans. On Tuesday, the scientists reported that the whales use a much richer set of sounds than previously known, which they called a “sperm whale phonetic alphabet.”

People have a pho-ne-tic alphabet too, which we use to produce a practically infinite supply of words. But Shane Gero, a marine biologist at Carleton University in Ottawa and an author of the study, said it’s unclear whether sperm whales similarly turn their phonetic sounds into a language.

“The fundamental similarities that we do find are really fascinating,” Dr. Gero said. “It’s totally changed the way we have to do work going forward.”

Since 2005, Dr. Gero and his colleagues have followed a clan of 400 sperm whales around Dominica, an island nation in the eastern Caribbean, eavesdropping on the whales with underwater microphones and tagging some of the animals with sensors.

Sperm whales don’t produce the eerie melodies sung by humpback whales, which became a sensation in the 1960s. Instead, they rattle off clicks that sound like a cross between Morse code and a creaking door. Sperm whales typically produce pulses of between three and 40 clicks, known as codas. They usually sing these codas while swimming together, raising the possibility that they’re communicating with one another.

Over the years, Dr. Gero and his colleagues have reviewed thousands of hours of recordings of the undersea noise. It turns out that sperm whale codas fall into distinct types.

One type, for example, called “1+1+3,” consists of two clicks separated by a pause, followed by three clicks in quick succession.

With backing from philanthropists, Dr. Gero and his colleagues started “Project CETI,” (for “Cetacean Translation Initiative”), to investigate whether artificial intelligence and other computing advances could decode whale songs. (The name is a play on SETI , the famous effort to search for extraterrestrial life; whales are also known as cetaceans.)

As part of the project, Pratyusha Sharma, a computer science graduate student at M.I.T., gave the data from Dominica a fresh look. But she was frustrated by the way biologists had visualized it.

On a computer screen, the codas appeared as a series of dots along a horizontal line, each dot representing a click. Ms. Sharma found it hard to compare codas, especially when two or more whales were singing over each other. So she instead plotted each coda’s clicks as dots on a vertical line, and then placed codas along a horizontal line based on when each began.

Using the new layout, Ms. Sharma saw something new. When a sperm whale repeated a coda, it sometimes stretched out the time between the clicks and then gradually tightened it up. Ms. Sharma and her colleagues called this phenomenon “rubato,” a musical term for speeding up a tempo and then slowing it down.

Dr. Gero was startled that Ms. Sharma could see something in sperm whale songs that he and his colleagues had missed for years. “It was a way we hadn’t looked at it,” he said.

Codas are so quick that the human ear can miss a rubato. But the researchers found the pattern in thousands of recorded codas.

The researchers believe that rubato plays an important role in whale communication. They found that after one whale used rubato, neighboring whales would rapidly match the tempo change with their own codas.

Ms. Sharma’s new visualizations also revealed that sperm whales could occasionally add an extra click to the end of the coda, a behavior they call ornamentation. The scientists found evidence that the extra clicks were not just pointless flourishes. The whales that led groups often used ornamentation, after which their followers often responded with codas of their own.

The analysis showed that the conventional catalog of sperm whale codas could not capture their full complexity. Sperm whales can produce a 1+1+3 coda, for example, that lasts four-fifths of a second, or one second, or 1.25 seconds. Other codas may last only one-third of a second or half a second.

All told, the researchers identified 156 different codas, each with distinct combinations of tempo, rhythm, rubato and ornamentation. Dr. Gero said that this variation is strikingly similar to the way humans combine movements in our lips and tongue to produce a set of phonetic sounds.

A single sound like “ba,” or “na” carries no semantic meaning on its own. But we can combine them into meaningful words like “banana.” The researchers raised the possibility that sperm whales might combine features of codas to convey meaning in a similar way.

Other experts said the whale alphabet marked an exciting advance. But they said sperm whale codas might be more akin to music than language.

“Music can have a strong influence on emotions without it actually conveying information,” said Taylor Hersh, a bioacoustician at Oregon State University. Rubato might be one way for sperm whales to tighten their social bonds, she speculated, by matching their songs.

Jacob Andreas, a computer scientist at M.I.T. and an author of the study, said that the alphabet is allowing the researchers to dig deeper into whale songs. “Now we have gotten the machinery in place to start tackling the much more ambitious, long-term goal for Project CETI, which is trying to figure out what all of this actually means.”

Microphones deployed in the Caribbean are capturing ocean sounds 24 hours a day, and scientists are programming computers to learn how to pick sperm whale songs out from the background noise.

Dr. Andreas and his colleagues are also training artificial intelligence programs similar to ChatGPT. After listening to the sperm whale songs, these models might learn to recognize not just rubato and ornamentation, but other features that scientists have missed.

The hope is that computers will then be able to compose whale songs of their own, which could then be played to the whales.

That effort leaves other experts skeptical. Luke Rendell, a marine biologist at the University of St Andrews, in Scotland, worries that the A.I. models assume whale songs are a kind of language, rather than something more like music.

“I’ve no doubt that you could produce a language model that could learn to produce sperm-whale-like sequences,” Dr. Rendell said. “But that’s all you get.”

Produced by Antonio de Luca and Hang Do Thi Duc

Audio by Project CETI .

Carl Zimmer covers news about science for The Times and writes the Origins column . More about Carl Zimmer

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