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Carousel – Fall/Winter 2005-6

Volume 18

Fall/Winter 2005-6

Biannual

R.T. Duffer

In bookstores, the quirky and curious Carousel is filed under Literary or Visual Art. This international journal offers poems, cartoons, drawings, cartoon-like drawings, a few ads, mixed media, boobs, prose poems, a naked woman embracing a polar bear, charcoal watercolors, macabre big-faced drawings on graph paper, a list of phobias and more.

In bookstores, the quirky and curious Carousel is filed under Literary or Visual Art. This international journal offers poems, cartoons, drawings, cartoon-like drawings, a few ads, mixed media, boobs, prose poems, a naked woman embracing a polar bear, charcoal watercolors, macabre big-faced drawings on graph paper, a list of phobias and more. The editors feel that Carousel‘s philosophies are “more directly in line with the expansive perspectives inherent in today’s global magazine culture.” Oh. It is also a hard to categorize art-book featuring Canadian artists. The sole prose story, Renee Hartleib’s “Cat and Mouse,” introduces us to Brenda who asserts her independence by buying a house and moving away from her sheltering parents at the tender age of thirty. One day she returns home from work to find a drunken bum roosted on her porch, forcing her to confront him or call Daddy, “‘It’s like a real job,’ he says. ‘9 to 5, you know?'” Libby Hague’s black and white charcoal water colors of animals are endearing; the pieces of man, as a boogeyman and clown, are outright creepy. The prose poem, “Still Life: Two Tourists at a Sidewalk Café” by Louisa Howerow exposes the artist’s mind by questioning one frozen image. It could be about the woman who owns the café, or her sick husband or her son waiting on the lost tourist couple, “The story possibilities break off; everyone moves into action.” Other pieces in Carousel have a similar feel: Mark Laliberte’s “Drowning Cartoon” is an arm outstretched in ripples of water; Keith Jones’s busy urban drawings suggest man’s relationship with machines and his exploitation of his environment; Barbara Pelman’s poem, “We Play Bridge,” is a snapshot of a daughter observing her mother and the inevitable aging as they play cards. Carousel indeed. 

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