Ink Pot – December 2003

Unprepared for the edginess of this journal, I almost stopped reading Ink Pot less than a quarter of the way through. What a mistake that would have been. This is a journal brimming with life, its poems, stories and flash fiction crackling with energy.

Unprepared for the edginess of this journal, I almost stopped reading Ink Pot less than a quarter of the way through. What a mistake that would have been. This is a journal brimming with life, its poems, stories and flash fiction crackling with energy. Ink Pot takes chances—not your standard literary fare. In these pages, we visit some strange worlds: a mall where the security guard acts out his sadism on what he believes are invisible fish; a home laboratory where a man studies a hologram of his daughter’s brain; a puppet show where Punch dispatches Judy and then turns on the audience. Not every piece works in this collection, and some formatting problems can be distracting. But Ink Pot makes up for it with freshness and daring and some tremendous raw talent. Take, for instance, Marc Phillips’ prose in the story “A Fancy and Horrible Thing,” at once funny, vibrant, explosive, lucid: “In that box of roaches with a door that wouldn’t lock and windows that wouldn’t raise, I found a remarkable thing. This thing had apparently nested itself in the trod-down carpet scraps with the mildew and vomit stains, waiting lo these many months for someone to discern its odor among the others and recognize it for what it was. A festering epiphany, so rotten that it had to be on the bottom; it was the seed of philosophy.” Dig a little in this journal and you’ll find lots of gems like this. After finishing Ink Pot, I picked up a more traditional, established literary magazine. Professional, polished, but predictable, it left me missing the surprises of Ink Pot. [Lit Pot Press, Inc., 3909 Reche Rd., Ste. 132, Fallbrook, CA 92028. E-mail: [email protected]. Single issue $10. http://www.litpot.com/] – DM