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Alice Blue – Issue 8

Issue 8

Biannual Image

Micah Zevin

Upon entering the first page of Alice Blue you encounter tiny square shaped images of odd looking stuffed animals that, when touched with clicking mouse, turns into a word denoting each distinctive section of their website. With issue number 8 of Alice Blue you are reminded of E.E. Cummings at his surrealist best with a healthy swath of absurdist tendencies incorporated into a mix of short prose pieces and poems ranging from experiments in form, language or both.

Upon entering the first page of Alice Blue you encounter tiny square shaped images of odd looking stuffed animals that, when touched with clicking mouse, turns into a word denoting each distinctive section of their website. With issue number 8 of Alice Blue you are reminded of E.E. Cummings at his surrealist best with a healthy swath of absurdist tendencies incorporated into a mix of short prose pieces and poems ranging from experiments in form, language or both.

In Christian Peet’s subversive prose piece “Classified,” we encounter an “(ongoing memorandum)” on the “Surveillance of ‘Virtuous Pagans,’” (a take on groups seen as a threat to the government) where a political phone call is addressed to the groups poet laureate. In Corey Mesler’s prose piece “Boo Enema,” we are introduced to fictional hippie poet Camel Jeremy Eros from Memphis, Tennessee. We are transported to an alien scene in Camel’s home: “Earth is calling on the Cosmic Cellphone and Camel, slowly, like a titan emerging from the enveloping sea, raises his head.”

When you’ve gotten your prose fix, move onto the poetry, which is no less surreal or poignant. In “Two hundredths of a beautiful woman” by Mathew Savoca, the speaker states, “understand you’re the man to see / about a shovel / when two hundredths of a beautiful woman / walk by asking me if i want to marry her.” In “discipline” by Andrea Kneeland Pinocchio and Geppetto have a philosophical discussion about being human:

PINOCCHIO: Every object is a tool of reflection-
GEPPETTO: I’ll slice out the dog of your heart. I’ll die inside the heart of a dog-fish, in the heart of the swell of a wave. I’ll watch little black rabbits bury your heart in the heart of a billow brown field.

Alice Blue will tickle your intellectual and satirical imagination so hard you may turn blue. This is not such a bad thing if you get to pretend you are as wonderfully strange and profound as the characters, voices and words you’ll encounter in this eclectic journal.
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