Anti – June 2012

Anti- is, as the editors explain, “contrarian, a devil’s advocate that primarily stands against the confinement of poetry in too-small boxes. Anti- wants to provide a single arena for a wide range of styles and ideas, so these different kinds of poets and poems can either fight it out or learn to coexist.” What I found most interesting with this issue of Anti- is the vast breadth of styles that it packs; each poet seemed to bring something different. With some of the poems, I was just captured by the titles alone: “Dictator, By Which I Mean the Mother Brandishing a Pistol with a Piñata over Her Head” and “When they squeeze us the wind splinters where we used to be, which is also where we are now.”

Anti- is, as the editors explain, “contrarian, a devil’s advocate that primarily stands against the confinement of poetry in too-small boxes. Anti- wants to provide a single arena for a wide range of styles and ideas, so these different kinds of poets and poems can either fight it out or learn to coexist.” What I found most interesting with this issue of Anti- is the vast breadth of styles that it packs; each poet seemed to bring something different. With some of the poems, I was just captured by the titles alone: “Dictator, By Which I Mean the Mother Brandishing a Pistol with a Piñata over Her Head” and “When they squeeze us the wind splinters where we used to be, which is also where we are now.”

In Gregory Sherl’s “We Can’t Schedule a Seduction,” the narrator makes collect calls to God, offering up a list of excuses for his actions. “Discarded Cosmos,” by Vincent Guerra, examines the details of people and objects that the speaker passes by or notices, a “constellation of things”:

I tallied the wayward objects: a clustered galaxy
    of cellophane marooned in grass, a napkin
        crumpled to coral, a drinking straw’s shucked cocoon
    flattened on the path. Whose lips these things
        have touched and where and why? Whose hands
undid them? Where do the clothes on the forest floor
        come from? . . .

More great poetry comes from Oliver Bendorf (“Postcard from Lake Mendota”), Benjamin Sutton (excerpts from Notes from the Daydreaming), Maureen McHugh (two untitled poems), and Naoko Fujimoto (My Father’s Ivory Die).
[anti-poetry.com]