Reviews
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For those of us on the ramparts against the electronic onslaught, take heart in Tough Poets Review. A print literary journal in our AI age is as perverse as Dostoevsky’s Underground Man, which means that it’s refreshingly human. I suggest you take some time to sit back, flip through it, and be perversely human with it.”
— Kurt Hemmer, professor of English Literature at Harper College and editor of The Encyclopedia of Beat Literature
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Tough Poets Review 02 doesn’t suffer from the dreaded sophomore slump. Writers, artists, and talkers from all over the planet converge on its 185 pages to challenge the ‘daily psychodrama’ of living in this broken world. Funny, imaginative, and deadly serious, Tough Poets Review employs truth as kryptonite to deflect and defuse the lies we are fed everywhere we turn, and reassures us the written, and printed, word will win in the end.”
— Alan Bisbort, editor of PleaseKillMe.com; author of Hip, Bohemian, and Counterculture: History and Legacies from 1830 to the Present
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Tough Poets Review unties its trademark knotted pencil and lets its poets run wild in exhibitions of joyous free-range poetry. A magazine to keep your eye on.”
— Billy Collins, Poet Laureate of the United States (2001–2003), and Poet Laureate of New York State (2004–2006)
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Tough Poets Review feels like being surrounded by your most erudite, eccentric, forward-thinking artist friends—the kind of friends who question everything with intensity and whimsy in equal measure, and, in that process, open up new ways of thinking and being. Within its pages are flights of fancy and not-knowing that lead you to look at the world differently once you’ve put it down. And that is a rare and much cherished feat.”
— Nihaarika Negi, interdisciplinary artist recognized at Sundance + WIF, Film Independent, the Venice Biennale, and the UK Arts Council; Berlinale Talent 2021; NewImages XR Festival award winner; and author of the graphic novel Hunger, which debuted at NYCC 2025
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Urgent as a secret and true as a good joke, the inaugural issue of Tough Poets Review announces the arrival of an impressive and irreverent new literary journal and suggests that subsequent issues are not to be missed.”
— Kathleen Rooney, founding editor of Rose Metal Press, founding member of Poems While You Wait, and author of Man Overboard!
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Tough Poets Review 02 doesn’t ask permission. Kathleen Cullen and Rick Schober have assembled something that resists its moment by going deeper into it. Sven Birkerts parsing Kundera and surveillance from a 2026 Substack daybook, Lydia Lunch burning two prose poems to the ground, Dario Calmese turning Kennedy Yanko’s sculpture into a theology of surviving language as control, Nihaarika Negi on why horror is the only honest genre for decolonial fiction. The form is the argument. Read it slowly. Keep it after they burn the textbooks. You might need it.”
— Bil Brown, photographer, director, writer, and editor-in-chief of Black & Grey magazine
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Tough Poets Review is wild. It’s cool, nerdy, committed, rich with DIY lineages—an impressive labor of love on the part of its editors, whose curatorial skills shine through in this cultural cornucopia. I came for the poetry but stayed for the conversations, the stories, the photographs, and the quietly powerful synergies that animate the issue. I hope Tough Poets Review will run and run . . .”
— Dr. Rona Cran, Associate Professor in Twentieth-Century American Literature at the University of Birmingham; author of Collage in Twentieth-Century Art, Literature, and Culture: Joseph Cornell, William Burroughs, Frank O’Hara, and Bob Dylan
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A bold move to bring out a print literary journal in these digital days, but Tough Poets Review is nothing if not bold. Its tough-minded poetry and prose come as a relief at this self-censoring, politically correct time, and the striking photographs and drawings aren’t fawning for likes. Older readers may be reminded of the Evergreen Review in its heyday, and younger ones have a new journal worthy of their backpack.”
— Steven Moore, author of The Novel, An Alternative History and My Back Pages: Reviews and Essays
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Tough Poets Review is revolting—in the best sense of that word. The writers, artists, and thinkers in this debut issue are rebels to their core. Their work is alternately funny, smart, unpredictable, and startlingly honest. Think of this as the antidote to the AI-curated echo chamber of nonsense at the heart of a civilization on life support. In a future (better) world, this will be a long-lived journal.”
— Alan Bisbort, editor of PleaseKillMe.com; author of Hip, Bohemian, and Counterculture: History and Legacies from 1830 to the Present