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Black Clock – Fall/Winter 2005-06

Issue 4

Fall/Winter 2005-06

Biannual

Matt Bell

Black Clock is hands down the best looking literary magazine I’ve ever picked up. To begin with, it’s a huge 8″ x 11″ volume with full color graphics not only on the cover but throughout the magazine. The inside layout is both graphically intense and minimalist at the same time, visually engaging without distracting from the writing itself. Luckily, Black Clock‘s looks aren’t the only thing it has going for it—it’s got personality too. Black Clock is hands down the best looking literary magazine I’ve ever picked up. To begin with, it’s a huge 8″ x 11″ volume with full color graphics not only on the cover but throughout the magazine. The inside layout is both graphically intense and minimalist at the same time, visually engaging without distracting from the writing itself. Luckily, Black Clock‘s looks aren’t the only thing it has going for it—it’s got personality too. The issue opens with Rachel Zucker’s “Floating Wick in Petrol,” a poem full of vibrant imagery and evocative pacing—”I dream a woman puts a gun in my mouth / to make me choose – lustrous, sleek, sexed.” The prose in the issue consists of essays themed around lost causes and guilty pleasures, and includes work by Don DeLillo, Jonathan Lethem, and Rick Moody. Anthony Miller’s essay, “Damn It, I’m a Doctor,” is exactly what a guilty pleasure should be, in this case an almost excruciatingly honest account of Miller’s lifelong obsession with Star Trek’s Star Fleet Medical Reference Manual. Other essays detail the dark joys of Jethro Tull, Martin Lawrence, and the novels of Anthony Powell, while on the lost cause side of the issue, cases are made for Zane Grey’s Riders of the Purple Sage and the film Wanda. A fairly new magazine, Black Clock has already established itself as an interesting combination of art and writing. I look forward to seeing where it goes from here.
[www.calarts.edu/blackclock/]

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