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Ah, yes. Ugly Duckling Presse presents the most fashionable, talented and prescient poetry zine-journal of its time. That is, it will continue to advance the presentation and readability of great poetry. This is 6×6 at its most solid and diverse. Each poet in here is unique, touching and ingenious. Consider the first sentence of the first poem, which also appears on the cover, by Evan Willner: “If all tagalong creation insists on being.” A great enigmatic phrase of lucid abstraction.  Continue reading “6×6 – Spring 2007”

Brilliant Corners, “A Journal of Jazz and Literature” celebrates its tenth anniversary with this Summer 2007 issue, featuring numerous tributes to the late Whitney Balliet as well as poems, interviews and children’s poetry about jazz. For those like me wholly unfamiliar with The New Yorker jazz critic Balliet, you may be disappointed with the narrow scope of the journal. Continue reading “Brilliant Corners – Summer 2007”

The title Cave Wall might hearken back to days of Neanderthals and primitive times, but don’t be fooled: this literary magazine contains highly sophisticated, polished poetry. Still, it’s deep, not posh – it manages to touch you in a primeval sort of way – the way you want poetry to. The elegant blue vine on the white cover of this smallish collection gives a more accurate overall impression of its refinement than the title. Continue reading “Cave Wall – Winter 2007”

The word for Issue 44 of Columbia: A Journal of Literature and Art – Refreshing! In addition to the work of seventeen poets and four artists, the artistic layout and high quality construction contributes to the attractive overall effect. Continue reading “Columbia – Spring/Summer 2007”

When considering how to describe Diner, some words that come to mind are grit, greasy spoon, kitsch (in the irresistible way of roadside diners, Frida Kahlo) and funky. From the dark blue cover with its diner photos (table and chairs in front of a window reading “breakfast, lunch, dinner”; juke box; cherry pie; Bunn coffee maker) to a variety of poems and stories, many of which seem unlikely to find homes in more conventional journals, this issue of Diner made me nostalgic for things I didn’t know I missed. Continue reading “Diner – 2006”

I have carried Forklift, Ohio on my person at all times for the last month. Aside from revealing that I’m a nerd, this also indicates that Forklift is the perfect accessory for any engagement (poetry is this season’s trendy clutch). It’s dense (70 poems in 146 pages), and fantastic for show and tell with like-minded nerdy writer-types. Continue reading “Forklift, Ohio – Winter 2007”

The oversize High Desert Journal is a seductive collection of prose, poetry, art, and ambience. Michael P. Berman’s photography – introduced by Charles Bowden’s essay, “Under a Dry Moon”: “You learn to love the white light of midday in June when everything is flattened by the molten energy of the sun.” Continue reading “High Desert Journal – Spring 2007”

Insolent Rudder is an online magazine publishing flash fiction and very short “relatively” plotted stories of “no more than 1113 words.” The stories in the current issue oscillate between the comical and the poetic, and almost all of them are perfect illustrations of the condensed observations typical of flash – those seemingly effortless “pow!” moments that pack a lot of truth into very few words. From Jamie Lin’s Sequence of micros, “Falling Uphill”: “She was the round, shiny apple. I was the rotten tomato with too many weaknesses.” From Liesl Jobson’s “Ashram”: “I kneel before him, bending to kiss his instep. He loved it before when I sucked his toes. We must wait for the guru, he says, pushing me away.” From Bosley Gravel’s “The Bone Tree”: “Mother said they buried him deep that autumn, and she imagined him frozen in the earth waiting for spring like a fresh seed as the snow blew the last of the orange leaves.” Continue reading “Insolent Rudder – Summer 2007”

My personal favorite among this issue’s stories, Mary Slowik’s “Teeth,” takes the storyteller’s doctrine (dig where it hurts) to a brilliantly literal level. In her atmospheric, sinister story, the narrator, a dentist’s daughter, watches her father fix an exposed nerve: “The nerve waved blindly on the point of the probe. It reminded me of a single larva separated from its teeming kin, the heaving masses in our compost pile, the rows of soft grubs lined up in our beehives at home. And yet, I knew this tiny thread contained the most quivering pain.” All the pain hiding inside all the teeth (false teeth, hidden teeth…the theme connecting the story’s sections) erupts in a single, intense moment. Wow. Continue reading “The Iowa Review – Spring 2007”

It devours you, it challenges you. The fiction in The MacGuffin has muscle. The poetry can take you places in a few simple stanzas, with no visible effort. Such craftsmanship is hard to come by. Continue reading “The MacGuffin – Winter 2007”

With The Missouri Review now accepting e-mail submissions, who can say what masterpieces will now arrive; although this issue seems to have been assembled without that benefit, it is an intriguing collection. In addition to slaking my thirst for good fiction – stories by Jacob M. Appel, Erica Johnson Debeljak, Rachel Swearingen, and others – the contents include essays, poetry, and an interview with the disarmingly honest David Sedaris: “I’m not apolitical; I just don’t consider myself an original thinker, [. . .] I’m more the kind of person who might read something and then try to pass it off as my own.” Continue reading “The Missouri Review – Spring 2007”

If you think that high school poetry and fiction tends to be clever and stocked self-consciously with modifiers, you could be at least partly right, but if you passed up Polyphony H.S., you’d be missing a whole lot. Continue reading “Polyphony H.S. – 2007”

The 30th Anniversary Issue of Quarterly West is, from cover to cover, consistently and astonishingly good. This issue features AWP Intro Award Winners in fiction and poetry, and the Writers@Work Fellowship Award Winners in nonfiction and poetry. It opens with two stories that examine moments of grace: Steve Almond’s short-short “Phoenix” in which a john is redeemed by a thieving hooker, and Quan Berry’s story “Daily at the Gate of the Temple Which is Called Beautiful,” which, with just its title, promises to deliver us to a hallowed place, perhaps even to offer a moment of transcendence. I tried to decide what other of the six remaining stories to mention in this review, and could only come to this: you should read them all. The Writers at Work award-winning nonfiction piece, “16 Doors” by Brenda Sieczkowski, is structured in 16 numbered segments, each a door into the author’s memory and dreams, traveling from ancient China to modern-day Vermont, examining everything from family genealogy to cell structure. Continue reading “Quarterly West – Fall/Winter 2006/2007”

A new journal appearing both in print and online, Quay offers a crisp collection of fiction, non-fiction and drama. The print issue’s format (almost square) is unusual without trying too hard, and the same is true for the content. One of my favorites among the fiction pieces was J.P. Briggs’s “American Debut,” in which an agent and a producer discuss a starlet called Eva, “the next big icon of a generation,” while “[t]he snakes darted and skimmed in the swimming pool with their arrow heads flexed above the blue water.” I was also impressed with Myfanwy Collins’s “Cowless, Rainbowless,” a sequence of vignettes revealing the narrator’s hurt in nightmarish slow-motion. The beauty of the writing is an almost perfidious contrast to the narrator’s pain and loneliness. Completely different in style: Scott Humfeld’s “Capt. Spaulding and the Missing Motor,” a tale set in the Peruvian jungle, delivered with the authority and wit of first-hand experience. Continue reading “Quay – May/June 2007”

Smartish Pace is exclusively a journal of free verse poetry. It was a treat to read translations from Hindi – to have, as renowned translator Elliot Weinberger might say, “the news” of a faraway country brought to me through poetry. In Katyayani’s darkly-playful poem, “A Woman Hiding in Language,” a woman seems to disrupt language itself by hiding inside of it, such that, “. . .the dictators / didn’t get a wink of sleep all night. / That day the poets couldn’t play / with words searing as a mass of fire.” Shrikant Verma’s “Hastinapur” reminds me of how anyone might feel about a city or village in times of war or simply rapid change: “Just think / about that person / who comes to Hastinapur / and says: / “No, no this can’t be Hastinapur!” Though the average reader, like myself, probably speaks no Hindi, I thought it would have been illuminating to see the original poems – how they look on the page – as well as a read a translator’s note on the challenges in translating from Hindi to English. I’d have favored fewer poems in the issue to make space for this (several poets have 5-6 poems included). Continue reading “Smartish Pace – 2007”

Amsterdam – city of hashish, soccer riots, bicycles – city of canals, tall people, and even taller people – continues now to bring us this international literary journal. The word versal means rare or universal as defined on the inside of the superbly designed cover. In this Versal 5 are indeed rare words that will cut edges in your mind. If you seek Versal for the atmospheres of Amsterdam, though, you will be disappointed. Versal is perhaps not the best of international literature, but holds a sure-shot at becoming just that. Continue reading “Versal – 2007”