Posted June 18, 2012
inter|rupture
Issue 5
June 2012
Triannual
This issue of inter|rupture certainly had me lost in the words. With each author’s work, I anticipated something fresh, and I wasn’t disappointed. The imagery in this issue is what has lingered with me, long after I finished reading. I was haunted (in a fantastic and exhilarating way) by the imagery in Peter Jay Shippy’s “Last Requests” in which the narrator doles out a list of strange requests for the body the narrator will leave behind:
use my back for Scrabble and my skull to drive
the nail that held my picture into your wall,
take the beeswax from my ears so I can hear
one damned song, but fill my mouth with nectar
so that honeybees will love me at last
I was equally enthralled by the language of Mary Biddinger in “Risk Management Memo: Here Comes Your Man”:
Your refrigerator
is filled with steaks, and somebody
has folded an angora sweater
under your childhood scarecrow doll
with half a dozen pages inside torn
from various domestic
or Russian novels . . .
Other great imagery came from Sophie Klahr (“There, there now. / Only
in the kitchen are there roaches. They scatter in the light like water /
breaking as a stone enters.”), Gale Marie Thompson (“Crack a rib, and
birds fly out of a spoon.”), and Jeff Hipsher (“We see slow children
push hot bicycle frames / through thick yards of methane”). This poetry
journal has certainly done what it has set out to do: “startle and
assault the current by providing readers with emerging and established
artists who crave discovery.”
[interrupture.com]
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Stirring
Volume 14 Edition 6
June 2012
Monthly
Stirred is exactly how I felt after reading the fiction piece in this issue of Stirring; Lisa Locascio’s “Friend Request” made this issue well worth the read. The story is narrated by the father of a teenage girl whose username on “YourPage” is Susiecide. Throughout the story, the father monitors the young girl’s posts and photos, taking a peak into her personal world that she limits him access to. As I was reading it, I had to constantly remind myself that it was a piece of fiction: the characters and narration her felt so real and authentic that it seemed like it could be nonfiction. Locascio certainly did a great job taking on the voice of the father. She is careful and crafty in making all of these characters seem like real people.
Michael Salcman’s poem “The Shallow End of the Pool” resonates with a strong bond between mother and son:
It's not the first time the child floats out
and extends his fingers, ears half-stopped,
the turret of his head surveying
the shallow end of the pool with goggled eyes
as he listens to his heart beat time
and his mother looks on and worries,
smoothing her belly with golden arms,
in memory carrying him still.
Martin Balgach’s “If I am Not Alone” is also stirring as the narrator
thinks about “the leftover infatuations / of a lover / growing older /
beside the noise / of someone else’s coughs.” Although the issues of
this journal are short, the contents are well worth the read.
[www.sundresspublications.com/stirring]
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LITnIMAGE
Issue 16
Spring 2012
Quarterly
LITnIMAGE fuses flash fiction with edgy visual art to make a quirky online mag. My favorite piece from this issue is Justin Lawrence Daughtery’s “The Lobster Queen” which uses the symbol of the last lobster left in the tank at the grocery store to represent a young woman’s view on life. I loved the subtle hints and details, the interactions between the narrator and her sister and father, and the language that is used throughout. I was eager to read on after the first paragraph:
I tell Layla, my nine-year-old sister, to go to the end of the aisle, open a box of condoms (which I tell her are balloons), and put them in her pockets. Her clueless eyes widen. She sticks the rest of her chocolate bar in her mouth and drops the wrapper. I flick her curly, crimson hair. We play this game sometimes. I tell her to steal something and she does it and I pretend it’s okay. This way, if she gets caught, no skin off my dick. If I had one.
There is more worth reading in this issue including a story told
through five phone conversations by Jeremy Britton, a weaving of
narrative and skeptical look at popular television shows by Ella
Fishman, and an excerpt and interview with Harold Jaffe about his most
recent book OD: Docufictions. Of course, check out the images
as well; they blend together well with the fiction to make a
well-rounded magazine.
[www.litnimage.com]
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