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Knockout Literary Magazine – Spring 2010

Volume 3 Issue 1

Spring 2010

Biannual

Arthur Kayzakian

Simply put, the collection of poems in Knockout Literary Magazine is breathtaking. This edition includes a wide variety of topics such as suicide, oppression against homosexuality, and love (straight and queer). In its third volume, the heavy-hitting journal presents forty astounding poets, who make their way to the page bringing dark imagery, fearless honesty, and fresh voices, including Jeff Mann, Robert Walker, Joseph Massey, Jim Tolan and Ronald H. Bayes. Knockout also features translations from Dag T. Straumsvag, Yannis Ritsos, Harry Martinson, Jesus Encinar, and Olav H. Hauge.

Simply put, the collection of poems in Knockout Literary Magazine is breathtaking. This edition includes a wide variety of topics such as suicide, oppression against homosexuality, and love (straight and queer). In its third volume, the heavy-hitting journal presents forty astounding poets, who make their way to the page bringing dark imagery, fearless honesty, and fresh voices, including Jeff Mann, Robert Walker, Joseph Massey, Jim Tolan and Ronald H. Bayes. Knockout also features translations from Dag T. Straumsvag, Yannis Ritsos, Harry Martinson, Jesus Encinar, and Olav H. Hauge.

Walker’s stunning piece, “Detail from My History of Violence” hit me where it counts:

For a moment,
his boa isn’t broken
and my hands are clean
and I have nothing to regret.

Dag T. Straumsvag’s “Remedy,” Matthew Hittinger’s “Letter to Mexico,” Russel Melia’s “Letter to the Editor,” Charles Jensen’s “Safe,” and Stephen S. Mills’s “Against Our Better Judgment We Plan a Trip to Iran” reflect on both oppression and the intimacy behind homosexuality. Mills’s poem illustrates the eroticism and forbidding act of queer sex in the middle-east with provocative language. “But by morning you’ll back out, rip our plane tickets / into pieces, and we’ll lie in bed watching CNN, / fucking without condoms until everything burns.”

Poets Joyce Sutphen, Mark Terrill, Victoria Givotovsky, and Sarah Rairden Flynn paint the intensity of suicide. As does “Boy Walking Ahead of Train” by Kelly Madigan Erlandson, which beautifies the suicide of a young boy against an incessant train and its steel tracks:

It was music that the walker heard,
instead of warning—
two cups at his ears, a fine cord, a silver disk.

So much we do not know.

Joseph Massey’s melancholy landscape poetry is striking. In “Lost Coast,” he writes,

…We
pull over
to argue, not
to talk,
but the words
won’t form
the terrain
overtakes them.

It continues, “We / don’t need words / to read the sun’s / angle. We know.”

A captivating verse is Denver Buston’s “Real Estate,” “after whispering there is no quiet like the quiet / of the morning grass still wet from night’s breath.” Another verse that stands out addresses suicide in “One Way to Imagine your Death” by Sarah Rairden Flynn; the intimacy of death overcomes me when I read, “The last blackberry you eat // will taste like water.”

The issue ends with editor Jeremy Halinen interviewing Charles Jensen for nineteen pages. Jensen’s intelligent analysis of poetry is worth reading through carefully.

Knockout Literary Magazine possesses an edge unique in quality. If the sheer power and distinctive writing is not for you, then never mind that one of the driving forces of Knockout is its diverse inclusion of queer and straight writers. Pay no mind to the sincere generosity exercised by the editors for contributing five percent of accounted sales by Knockout’s third issue to The Trevor Project, a nationwide program that helps fight suicide among the lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and questioning youth.
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