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Underground Voices Magazine – February 2009

February 2009

Monthly Image

Henry F. Tonn

This literary magazine likes to publish “quality, hard-hitting, raw, dark fiction, flash fiction, short stories, prose and poetry.” The online version comes out monthly and there is a print edition that is published annually in December. Archival and recent material is often intermingled.

This literary magazine likes to publish “quality, hard-hitting, raw, dark fiction, flash fiction, short stories, prose and poetry.” The online version comes out monthly and there is a print edition that is published annually in December. Archival and recent material is often intermingled.

The featured story is a novella by Ryan David Jahn entitled “American Loser,” a title that is certainly appropriate to the narrative. It concerns an overweight thirty-six year old man who does not want to tell his wife he has been fired from his job, so he continues to leave for work every day, but robs banks instead. While this is not exactly a new or innovative plot, it is definitely presented in an engaging manner. All readers prone toward loserness (loserdom?) will have no difficulty identifying with the character.

Another engaging read is “A Burned Out Case” by D.E. Fredd, which concerns a young man forced out of his apartment due to a fire, who must temporarily move in with a weird, pot-smoking, tree-hugging, proselytizing part-time teacher who wanders around naked in his apartment on all fours because he’s “doing a study on how crawling enhances left and right brain communication in adults.” The following sentence presents an excellent flavor of the story: “He crab-walked down the hall towards the bathroom, his balls swinging like church bells.” A different, but just as notable, story is “A Fine Romance” by Billy O’Callaghan, about two strangers who make a connection on the street almost without speaking.

The poetry selections are primarily sharp and uncompromising, such as John Grochalski’s “biography,” which begins:

mexican beer can
crushed on the pavement
while my grandfather tosses
a bag full of his piss
down a hallway
in the rest home
and babbles with his wife
who has been dead nearly
twelve years.
he’s waiting for an
aortic aneurysm to burst

A little grim! There are also archival nonfiction offerings, and some interesting art, plus two sections the classification of which are not made immediately clear on the website: “purging” and “prose.” Nonetheless, there is a lot of lively reading to be found here in a colorful setting (lots of reds), and everything is easily found at your fingertips.
[www.undergroundvoices.com]

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