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SpringGun – 2012

Volume 4 Number 1

Fall 2012

Biannual Image

Kirsten McIlvenna

SpringGun, available through issuu, publishes work that is “unexpected, sudden, immediate, urgent—it’s happening now.” In the words of the editors, SpringGun is “simultaneously insane, comical, violent, practical, ingenious, irresponsible, terrifying, vulnerable, and deadly.”

SpringGun, available through issuu, publishes work that is “unexpected, sudden, immediate, urgent—it’s happening now.” In the words of the editors, SpringGun is “simultaneously insane, comical, violent, practical, ingenious, irresponsible, terrifying, vulnerable, and deadly.”

Laney Arbelaez’s “With Abbey” switches between second person (with the male character, Lee, talking to “you”—his girlfriend, Abbey) and third person. And while we get some characterization from the third person point of view, Abbey’s true character (or at least Lee’s image of her) truly comes through in those sections where Lee talks. We find out the reason behind his night terrors (which we see happen in the third person): “I also know that if I had a dime for every bad dream you gave me, I would be a wealthy man and then if you kept giving them to me and kept giving them to me for the rest of our lives we could actually have the next one because I’d be making a hell of a living.”

I loved Alice Bolin’s first two contributing poems, written in small prose stanzas. They contain lots of striking images and go together (both titled “junk mail”). The second one starts:

I see inside your spelling. Alphabet magnets glob each other to a single peach-gray mass. I’m not sure you ever existed. Your friends can spell your name but they mispronounce it if they say it to themselves.

Paige Taggart intrigues in her excerpt from Still Places to Go, willing the reader to want to read more from that piece. It is broken apart into sections, a paragraph a page, starting with a “{}” to break apart the sections. Here is the first segment:

I have fucked a taboo and rang my head around its white philosophy. For clearly you are meant to critique the solitary pastures of no sky. And in it, what isn’t broken should be. There are ribbons turning quicksand into land. And momentum shifted is change underway. And a charged killing spree is the nuclei for depression. And widows. Widows can see when light breaks. And day takes over and the photo isn’t real.

In addition to the poetry and fiction, there is a separate part of the issue (found on their website and not in issuu) that focuses on “e-lit + digital art.”
[www.springgunpress.com]

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