The Canary – 2005

There are many magazines that claim to be eclectic, but The Canary is one of the few I’ve read that is truly deserving of the title. A five page free-form poem might be followed by a rhymed couplet, which might be followed by a narrative driven prose-poem. If it is going on in modern poetry, you can probably find it represented here. This all-poetry magazine has no art, non-fiction or even an editor’s introduction. There are many magazines that claim to be eclectic, but The Canary is one of the few I’ve read that is truly deserving of the title. A five page free-form poem might be followed by a rhymed couplet, which might be followed by a narrative driven prose-poem. If it is going on in modern poetry, you can probably find it represented here. This all-poetry magazine has no art, non-fiction or even an editor’s introduction. Instead there are 125 pages of pure poetry. With so much great work inside, it is hard to know what to comment on, yet I really enjoyed Fanny Howe’s “Tonight or Never”: “The more radiant an essence, / the less they like it, those cops and doctors. / Their doctrine is not to let / a patient become a ghost at any cost.” Suzanne Buffam has a nice prose-poem titled “Anaktoria” about a committee deciding what “of this black planet’s myriad sights most honors the bold, high peaks of the human heart” and G. C. Waldrep has two evocative poems. The Canary is a great magazine for poetry, from start to finish. [http://thecarnary.org] – Lincoln Michel