Polyphony H.S. – 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.

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. This 98-page literary magazine has a slick, colorful, collage art cover by Tony Fitzpatrick: faces, figures, signs, musical notes and images all surrounding a train coming right at you! The smorgasbord of poems and short stories is imaginative with a capital “I.” They are full of angles that only young people with few preconceptions can come up with, making up for what they lack in life’s experience with insight and ‘what-ifs’. A fond, eloquent ode to aging mothers who are not aging gracefully is the subject of “Only Her Lilac Tears,” a short-short by Minh Ha. Pyro” by Amanda Kaufman will both fascinate and horrify the reader with her highly imaginative tale. An intriguing ‘what-if’ scenario spelled out in eerie, potent 1984-style, is about human’s future battle to conquer emotions. In this short fiction, “Emotion Control,” by Lindsey Maxson, the reader is actually drawn emotionally to a cyborg or robot with a purpose –a spy? It deftly begs the question, “What is life?” Jacob Walters’s “The Color of Sound” asks “What is the sum of the life of an old man, and what does he lose when he dies?” Walters intrigues us by playing with opposites using words and phrases and effectively puts to the reader the eternal question: What is death? This publication is chock-full of amazing stunts of youthful creation and well worth the time. [http://www.polyphonyhs.com]