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580 Split – 2005

Issue 7

2005

Annual

Jennifer Gomoll

Experimental poetry can be a challenge: of the pieces you enjoy, it’s difficult to say what moved you so. Of the pieces you don’t like, you want to ask why nobody’s telling the emperor to put some damn pants on. The poetry of 580 Split left me feeling a bit of both, but is sure to be enjoyed by those who appreciate avant-garde literature.

Experimental poetry can be a challenge: of the pieces you enjoy, it’s difficult to say what moved you so. Of the pieces you don’t like, you want to ask why nobody’s telling the emperor to put some damn pants on. The poetry of 580 Split left me feeling a bit of both, but is sure to be enjoyed by those who appreciate avant-garde literature. A sampling of what you’ll find: C.S. Carrier’s “To Leave Then Return,” which includes the enigmatic lines: “In a past life the baseboard / crouched in the belly of a giant raven that flew only / when magnets said it was time.” Steve Davenport’s “Another Hundred-Line Drunken Cowboy Sonnet”: “The family you’re building with me is a yodel / jumping with blood noise, liquor through my veins […]” My personal favorite, Lisa Jarnot’s lovely “Birthday Poem,” has winter saying “hello to the sparrows and their tiny / hearts rise like the sunrise to be seen / climbing up out of the staircase as it / says hello to me my better self, my / better self in spring.” Of the issue’s fiction, Karina Fuentes’s “Committing Sin,” is particularly well done. It concerns a woman who has been institutionalized by her bible-thumping, wife-beating husband. She takes comfort in delusions of being married to Elvis Presley and having his baby. If it sounds over the top, well, it could have been, but Fuentes makes good work of it.

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