Dragnet Magazine – June 2012
Issue 5
June 2012
Kirsten McIlvenna
Just from the cover, the graphics, and the presentation of the magazine—easy to read online and compatible with phones and tablets—I was impressed with this gem. The first story, Andrew Borkowski’s “Legomaniac,” drew me right in as a great nonfiction piece with a very interesting character, an old woman who is insistent on winning over the love of his daughter. I also really loved Nadia Ragbar’s “The Fair,” in which she denies her attraction to Rusty, a boy who gives her a gift of a small Chief figurine: “I left to buy a Coke, my left hand fiddling with the change in my left jeans pocket, the figurine jammed in the middle of my palm with the plastic headdress making a crown of points in the meat of me. My heart beating around it, in my right jeans pocket.”
Just from the cover, the graphics, and the presentation of the magazine—easy to read online and compatible with phones and tablets—I was impressed with this gem. The first story, Andrew Borkowski’s “Legomaniac,” drew me right in as a great nonfiction piece with a very interesting character, an old woman who is insistent on winning over the love of his daughter. I also really loved Nadia Ragbar’s “The Fair,” in which she denies her attraction to Rusty, a boy who gives her a gift of a small Chief figurine: “I left to buy a Coke, my left hand fiddling with the change in my left jeans pocket, the figurine jammed in the middle of my palm with the plastic headdress making a crown of points in the meat of me. My heart beating around it, in my right jeans pocket.”
And the issue goes on with more fantastic and entertaining pieces as a woman stays with a man just so she can see the puppies his dog will have (Julie McArthur’s “The Promise of Puppies”), two men discuss what it means to have “sex into a mirror” (Dan Christensen’s “Badass”), and a young girl stresses over what it will be like to have sex with her boyfriend named Jesus (Meredith Hambrock’s “Third Base”): “she doesn’t really know how to have sex with Jesus. What he expects. There should be fasting, twelve stations of the foreplay, a last supper for her virginity.” There is even a ten page comical survey for taste testing mousse that shows the ridiculousness of the survey by asking questions not only about mousse but about every facet of the personal life. Because this issue is packed with so much great work, I can’t wait to see what stories the next issue brings.
[dragnetmag.net]