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Supermachine – 2010

Issue 1

2010

Biannual

Terri Denton

This thin, yet surprisingly full journal is a collection of poems far more diverse than their numbers might suggest. It was a wonder reading all these lovely pieces, and I’m hoping that there are many more issues of Supermachine to follow.

This thin, yet surprisingly full journal is a collection of poems far more diverse than their numbers might suggest. It was a wonder reading all these lovely pieces, and I’m hoping that there are many more issues of Supermachine to follow.

I loved Brandon Brown’s “Your Mom’s a Falconress”:

My temper tantrum is more tantric than
temporary. I surpass my whole neighborhood.

The neighborhoods I’ve flocked in and
made my nests – that’s how I get you ruffled.
Your mom, mythic and unperturbed, waiting in the wings.
Your mom funding your trip to Europe
like Katherine Hepburn in Suddenly Last Summer
and if you get devoured by little Italians
I will remember you perfectly and frequently.

With turns of phrases like temper tantrum into tantric and temporary, I couldn’t resist including it in this review, and could barely keep from recounting the entire thing.

Christian Hawkey’s untitled poem was equally as entertaining, as he slides swiftly from image to image, (“images / faster than pixels: ghosting”) – “the presence of an audience scribble the letters / l e n s. my calves on an iceberg, walrusing / around. The blubberscruntchwalk of all pinnipeds.”

Natalie Lyalin’s “I Want To Lead All These Lives” is a delightful read, as well:

Nothing we have done makes sense. Also, the most accurate
Memories are ones we never access. I’ve accessed all of mine and
Hacked them. I was the ice queen in first grade. I was the balloon
Released a year earlier…

Genya Turovskaya’s “Dreams In Winter” is a tenderly wrought prose poem with flashes of gentle violence (being eaten alive by a swarm of bees, for example):

I dream that he calls me and wants to see me. He wants to confront me with the fact that I love him. He says he has proof. I know that I no longer love him, but I feel the shame of being discovered, even though the discovery is of an expired feeling.

Matthew Zapruder’s two poems are fine examples of this magazine’s spectacular poems, and this issue ends with them. In the first, “Sad News,” he writes,

We have some sad news this morning
from Mars. But I’m thinking about lions. Someone
said something salient and my head became
a light bulb full of power exactly

the shape of my head.

Zapruder’s second poem, “When It’s Sunny They Push The Button,” is just as fabulous, and perhaps more so, than the first, but I will leave that one entirely for you to discover.

It’s not often one comes across such a small package that’s so full that it nearly bursts at the seams, but this tiny magazine of poems defies the odds and it has earned a place both in my heart and on my bookshelf.
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