Gargoyle – 2005

Gargoyle is the collection eclectic was invented for. Its contents include—in addition to the cartoon frontispiece by Patricia Storms offering aid and comfort to writers everywhere, and several photographic portraits—the non-fiction “Berkley Morning,” an excerpt from Phillip Henry Christopher’s Trippin’ with Charlie and “Dreaming Richard Brautigan” by Greg Keeler. Gargoyle is the collection eclectic was invented for. Its contents include—in addition to the cartoon frontispiece by Patricia Storms offering aid and comfort to writers everywhere, and several photographic portraits—the non-fiction “Berkley Morning,” an excerpt from Phillip Henry Christopher’s Trippin’ with Charlie and “Dreaming Richard Brautigan” by Greg Keeler. At least a third of this issue’s 465 pages is given over to poetry ranging from work by Kate Braverman, J.P. Dancing Bear, Rachel Galvin, James Grinwis, Patrick Lawler (“It’s as if after Pearl Harbor we declared war / on Spain” from “Duct Tape Monologue”) to Rusty Russell’s “Before and After Bloomington”: “The road between Champaign and Bloomington, IL / is an uncrossable distance. / I drove through the same sunset for a week without stopping, / and where Chicago should have been it was Saturday.” Fiction includes Kathy Acker’s “The Seattle Book,” presented as published—”most privately published / in fact not even well typed”—and Jim Barnes’s “The Visiting Writer” encountering Czech naivety. In Rick Moody’s “The Pirate Station,” the station enters old age in a state of decline “[. . .] imagines it can hear the music of the spheres and begins to totter down a long narrow corridor [. . .]” Lance Olsen’s “Every sentence is a kiss and every paragraph an embrace.” from “on the despisers of the body,” excerpted from his novel Nietzsche’s Kisses, seems to tell us how it is to drown, and/or be hospitalized; fascinating in either case. [www.gargoylemagazine.com] – Anna Sidak