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Literary Bohemian #14

In Blogzines, Magazine, online magazine, Website on April 6, 2012 at 10:28 am

-Reviewed by Harry Giles-

Literary Bohemian is a lavishly produced webzine, dedicated to ‘travel-inspired writing that transports the reader, non-stop, to Elsewhere’. Its homepage splash is a carefully designed collage of faux-retro travel iconography: luggage tags, postcards, coins and coffee in the hippest of sepia tones. There’s a full and well-organised archive of 14 issues, along with book reviews, travel photos, links to lodgings and destinations – a gorgeous wealth to enjoy. It’s lovingly put together, but I’ll admit the aesthetic irked me. I worried that this would be acquisitive, appropriative, with the destinations checked off like tallies in the bathrooms of backpacker hostels. Would it be travel as bourgeois privilege or aesthetic necessity?

It is, unsurprisingly, those poems which are totally immersed in and part of their locations which stand out most from the latest issue. In Sean Edgley’s ‘Postcard from Belgrade’, for example, the city is built from a complex scatter of images and energetic physical moments – a skinhead ‘erupting in biceps’, a girl with ‘hips poised like the centered swivel of scissors’, a city suffering ‘the sadness of Chinese restaurants’. Edgley patiently constructs his Belgrade through profusion and surprise: there is despair and disrepair here, but it is part of a living, breathing whole.

Athena Kildegaard’s ‘Five Views of Guanajuato’ takes a similar approach, though with more delicacy. The state is seen through five perspectives, and each summons a world experienced by believable people, operating within softly sketched social context. The language is direct but full of care, from clever use of sound (burros ‘sound one slack-jawed heave. / Brave bougainvillea bloom’) to shockingly perfect simile (‘tethered animals sad as beans’).

It is probably no coincidence that the most effective of the narrative pieces, the ‘travelogue’ of Doug Clark’s ‘Love in the Time of Facebook’, succeeds partly because the travel in it is essential, rather than chosen by pins in a map. Here travel is compelled by a love that feels true through its problematic as much as through its expressed emotion, and it has a liveliness that sings in direct, honest prose. (And all this despite an over-glib, ironising title!)

Less successful are those pieces where the speaker’s presence and judgements obscure the sense of place and movement. In Ken Turner’s ‘Crossing the Border Near Lahore’ all is heavy poetry (‘ghost trains groaned through the border / leaking their loads on the rails’) carrying a burden of external observation. Though ‘fear / swelled like a corpse in the sun’ has power, if somewhat laboured, it is  not given enough real context. ‘The birds must know / the history of this place’, but it’s not clear the author does, beyond the guidebook version. The poem is an unloving judgement, rather than a considered exploration. In his ‘Saigon Streets’, as well, every noun needs its overblown verb: ‘shutters snapped’, ‘motorbikes swarm’, and if that’s not enough they swarm ‘like angry bees’.

Similarly, in Sy Margaret Baldwin’s ‘Berlin’ the city feels pre-determined, expected. Despite often felicitous word choice (‘the first hairs of frost in a hard winter’ particularly struck me), pedantic sentences cramp the poem: ‘a waterfall of cheese / that coagulates in a sticky pool at the exact level / of my neck.’ Of course this Berlin is war-torn, is ‘bullet-pocked’, has a ‘bleak construction site’. And of course this is winter. I feel as though I am watching the film of Berlin, not being transported there. Even then, though, Baldwin does close with a sharp indrawn breath of insight – and it is true that even the least moving poems here all still take me at least some of the way.

Even when I was frustrated or bemused by a piece, I was glad to have read it. In Jennifer Faylor’s ‘After Your Funeral I Set Out to Find You in Different Time Zones’, I found the bland procession of unnamed countries (‘dark with foreign numbers’, ‘a beach somewhere’) something of a missed opportunity, but there was still beautiful control of sound and tightly paced revelation. Timothy Kercher’s ‘Lazarus’ is at its most convincing in the description through powerfully disjointed sentences, but less lively when the speaker enters the picture, overplaying the metaphor. ‘A town that is no longer / a husk shucked’ is a perfect, gorgeous image – so why add the lurching ‘like me’? And though in Mary Kovaleski Byrnes’s ‘Christmas Emotion Salad’ the humour may occasionally be too blunt or clunkily idiosyncratic – the opening line has far less subtlety in its cheer than the delicious closer – the poem is still in its own when the food arrives, summoning memories and futures and making my mouth water: sloppy and spicy, it is a delicious, over-seasoned, massive American meal.

The whimsy of travel has a strong place in the collection, especially in the ‘Postcard prose’. Jennifer Faylor’s ‘Buttons’ employs a magical whimsy just on the right side of sickly – occasionally overplayed, but very strong when parsimonious, especially in its closing sentences. In Kirby Wright’s ‘The Enemy Tree’ the playfulness is simpler and blacker, played calm and straight: the prose gives us one image, one experience, very clearly indeed, taking me straight to its strange country. Back in poetry, Jennifer Saunders’s ‘The Changing of the Flowers’ is a thoughtful villanelle whose sweetness and clarity of meaning almost carries it through the stumbles. Perhaps the peculiar off-beats and scattering of not-quite-rhymes are there to highlight the way her ‘immigrant clock runs counter / to this native marking of the time’, but if so it is a too-easy metaphor of form. Nevertheless, it caught me and held me and I returned to rethink the poem more than many of the others.

It is ‘A Photo of Pennsylvania in Fiji’, another Byrnes poem, which most represented the collection for me – this tension between the poems which summon a place with poetry’s magic, and those which obscure it with tendentious metaphor or weighty language. Her Appalachia is reflected in worn signifiers polished to a shine, whether through sound (‘coal / bucket, cricket dusk, hair gray static’) or insight (‘The Saturday church will heave with your wishes’). Her Fiji, though, is barely a sketch, and has the inevitable ‘Children dressed in American t-shirts’. It is as if Fiji is being seen from Appalachia rather than the other way around –  but perhaps that is how we travel: memory more present than observation, which is indeed the poem’s territory.

A mixed bag, then, but one I was delighted to rummage in. I like the motivation of the curation, its direction and drive, and am impressed with the variety and poise of the selection. I’d like to see more focus and commitment from the poets and the editors: what is it really that they want travel poetry and writing to do, and how does a writer really transport us? The best writers here are those fully absorbed in their places – for me the real successes of Literary Bohemian are, of course, when I am truly moved.

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Neon #28

In Magazine, online magazine, Website on March 7, 2012 at 10:30 am

-Reviewed by Barry Tench-

Sometimes you can look and look and then you have to really look; then you might see the light, even if it is the faint light of a Neon sign creeping across a hotel bedroom. You might listen in the dark, you might listen closely and perhaps you might make out a voice. It might be the voice Kerrie O’Brien describes in her poem ‘Blurring’:

‘Now I know I’m saying

None of this out loud.

But I’m hoping you’ll hear it in me

This time,

If you’re listening’.

Neon’s neat presentation and well placed poignant photographs make it an attractive proposition on a wet and wintry evening. What is even more impressive is the copy online, which you can also download for free and gently peruse over a mug of cocoa. I received #28 to review which says something for the longevity of Neon and its lasting appeal.

If there is a collective voice of Neon it has the terse and uncomplicated tone of a rail against the alienation of modern living. Take Danica Green’s ‘Me, You And Everything Else’:

‘blinding nights and charcoal days blending with the uniform

grey of what generally constitutes a normal life’…

…‘No one comes home. I sometimes take respite in my

stone-cold bed, and when I wake up from the dream, the world is

on fire.

I felt a kinship with writers trying to get to grips with the awkwardness of relationships: the etiquette of social interaction, the disquiet of staring down the twin barrels of loneliness and rejection. Despite tackling common poetic subjects, many of the poems use language that is both fresh and engaging. Kerrie O’Brien’s poem ‘Escape’ struck me for the line ‘it burns to be still’ and then again in ‘Every Morning’ she gives a cliché a nice turn when she writes ‘life off / the pedestal’. Catherine Owen’s poem ‘The Autopsy Report’ also stood out and I particularly enjoyed the phrase ‘post-haste to The Hall of Turning Things Inside Out’. In another poem, ‘The Climbing Accident’, Owen challenges us with images as surprising as ‘the T-bar of pharmaceutical barrenness’ and ‘her mind tallying up this budget of flesh’.

Patrick Gabbard makes interesting use of form in his poems. In ‘The Pines of Bucharest’ he manipulates spacing, line lengths and endings to give the poem an uneasiness. The jagged edge is perfectly suited to Gabbard’s surrealist images:

‘Between his thumb and forefinger her nipple –

She laughs again, louder this time before she collapses on his chest

And he thinks   I am a warm dead galleon’.

Light in the darkness of contemporary life is captured in the short stories in Neon 28. Danica Green gives us an existentialist reflection that has its lyrical moments: ‘Nothing ever happens uninvited, the most beautiful and painful experiences welcomed through an open window’. Allana Balek’s short story ‘An Ending’ is another existentialist narrative that has some poetic images: ‘I turn off the music and we listen to the wind. I wonder how long the sunset will last and if we’ll ever get to see another one’, and ‘Clouds, she says. Dreams. Sunlight. Catchy music and long, lazy afternoons.’ It’s a nicely crafted piece with a hard hitting punch line.

There is strong imagery in Emily O’Neill’s poems too and the final stanza of ‘Last’ is very sexy (don’t get me wrong, I’m not complaining): ‘so you sat me on the desk and pushed my skirt up around my hips’. In ‘Before the Elegy’ there is imagery of a very different kind but just as striking: ‘a car crash or bullet in lieu of that coward needle’.

Neil Sloboda’s poems are typified by his use of unexpected images. For example, in ‘After the Buyout’ he writes:

Perched on the edges

of cold metal chairs,

we hectored one another

about how best to employ the time:

rip apart rotting decks, tear off asphalt shingles,

or fell dying trees behind our homes?

I also liked the unusual juxtaposition in this poem: ‘unpacking / daydreams and peanut butter crackers’. There is an evocative metaphor in ‘Hives’: ‘the diamond-backed lancers’ and I love the idea of ‘a flip-toy dog who never lands / on his feet’. Sloboda, like all the writers here, shows a willingness to experiment with language and imagery to stir our emotions.

Kirby Wright’s stories, ‘Ticking Clock’ and ‘Green Fruit’ veer toward prose poetry whilst giving us strong narratives dotted with clear imagery: ‘The highway skirted a pineapple field that stretched to the horizon’. But again there is this feeling of disconnection: ‘Did I walk through that door?’ and the battle of coming to terms with emotions in a harsh landscape ‘As he drove East, he prayed the baby would never be born’.

The light thrown by Neon 28 is modern and edgy but it keeps enough hidden in the shadows to keep us guessing at what is really there, what is hiding in the corners and under the bed. My biggest concern is that what we find there might dissolve in the bright light of day.

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An Evening of Poetry and Music Visuals – by London Poetry Systems and Ferment

In Magazine, Performance Poetry on February 24, 2012 at 12:56 pm

@ The Albion Beatnik 28/01/2012

-reviewed by James Webster-

So I’m in the chaotically colourful, bustling and amazing bookshop that is the Albion Beatnik in Oxford and it’s very crowded and I am terrified of spilling my beer on a book. Here, London Poetry System have teamed up with Ferment ‘zine to deliver an evening of ‘cross media poetry’ which can apparently be translated as ‘poetry with technical hitches’, and aside from my fears of beer/book-related accidents, I’m having a whale of a time.

  • It’s hosted by George Topping, who has a flustered energy and likability, kind of channeling a Matt Smith vibe. He kept things moving smoothly, and was entertainingly cheeky towards latecomers.
  • He warms us up with ‘Love-Knot’ about warmth on a boat. It’s filled with amusingly dreadful puns (he’s ‘not a monogamist’, but a ‘mahoganist’) and funnily clunky rhymes.
  • The first feature is Lucy Ayrton, whose ‘Tarquin’ is the first multi-media poem of the night. And it sparkled, its twinkly and ominous backing music providing the perfect pitch to Ayrton’s cautionary tale of why you shouldn’t talk to strangers (especially if they’re demons). Tarquin makes an effective mixture smart-Alec and helpfulness, while the demon is coldly spiky in both description and dialogue. Combined with the music it makes for chilling listening.
  • Her other poems are full of slickly intricate rhymes, with a very natural delivery that belies her language’s complexity. She’s also very funny. ‘Fuck You Corporate-Land’ is an amazing performance of disappointment at the monotony of corporate environment (‘you’re disappointed? I was going to be the first ever brain surgeon/rock star’). And ‘I Don’t Hate Men, I Just Hate You’ is a highly amusing and perceptive piece on feminism and a certain kind of misogyny.
  • Then Paul Askew, the co-founder of Ferment (available on the night for the reduced price of £3) steps up to the plate.
  • He starts with this gem of an exchange with the audience:

Paul: “Can you hear me at the back?”

Audience Member: “No.”

Paul: “I suspect that was my mum, she likes to fuck with me.”

Audience Member: “Not literally …”

*Paul leaves, like, literally walks out the front door in a faux huff. The audience piss themselves laughing. Not literally.*

  • He does come back, treating us to some of his delectably surreal poetry.
  • He starts with some joke-poems about death, but he really gets going with a spectacularly meta acrostic about Oxford, that is about, um, trying to write an acrostic about Oxford with helpful hints (and eventually criticisms) from the city itself (‘I’VE GOT DREAMY SPIRES, LOOK AT ME!’). It’s also his poem from this issue of Ferment.
  • ‘The Time I Tried to Work in a Café’ is a showcase in using his absurdist tendencies to illustrate bizarre profundity. Describing the Chaos Café, a trendy student hangout, designed by the owner to be as anarchic as possible as she ‘loves chaos … want[s] to kiss its lips’. Balancing chaos against the shadow of perfection which is ‘hollow and so fragile you’re afraid to move’ Askew meditates on how lives court chaos, how they can embrace or control their own lack of control.
  • And he finishes with ‘The Crow’, a bit of a crowd favourite, with a nicely drawn character of the comic curmudgeonly crow and a funny situation that gives rise to an unlikely connection.
  • Next were two more multimedia poems, from LPS poets Jennie Cole and Jericho. Now, multimedia performance is a really exciting genre, and I’ve seen some really strong performances utilising video and sound, but both these poems came across as pretentious and inaccessible.
  • Jennie Cole’s ‘Cockaigne, A Pastoral’ shows us some interesting themes and phrases, but way too many of the lyrics were only vague poetical aphorisms and ultimately it’s too disconnected and oblique for me to connect with.
  • While Jericho’s ‘Vertigo’ feels like an über-pretentious fan video to Hitchcock’s Vertigo. It’s even more inaccessible and self-indulgent than ‘Cockaigne’.
  • Caroline Bird is next on, another poet who examines life through the lens of funny surrealism.
  • She treats us to a big mess of scare-stories, feelings and amusing randomness as she explains to us what’s happening ‘in every city of the world’. It’s all different aspects of city lives thrown onto the wall and somehow it all sticks.
  • ‘Our Lollypop Lady’ is not only a splendidly bizarre poem, but an excellent piece of common sense. Suggesting that relationships need an umpire she brings to life an ultra-fair character who ‘lives in the middle of the kitchen in a yellow tent’. It’s intelligently conceived and humorously realised.
  • While ‘Let the People Starve’ is on how love can make you stop caring about other things, taken to a ridiculous extreme (‘let’s … sink knives into everyone who said it wouldn’t last’).
  • ‘Pity the Female Casanova’ is very insightful on the falseness of adoration, while remaining impressively witty and ‘Facts’ gives us the facts around the edge of an experience; a poem coquettishly hinting and suggesting at a just perceived something.
  • Ross Sutherland, the final performer, gives us some more multimedia poetry with superb results.
  • Starting with an hilarious retelling of Little Red Riding Hood (that almost makes me snort beer out of my nose onto a nearby copy of The Forsythe Saga) with certain words replaced with the words 23 places below them in the dictionary, thus making the title ‘Liverish Red-Blooded Riff-Raff Hoo-ha’. It turned into a bizarrely coherent and political poem (‘Great Britain is illiberal and weaponless’ was a favourite) that was delivered with considerable verbal dexterity, while the accomplished video kept it grounded in the source material.
  • His ‘Experiment to Determine the Existence of Love’ is superbly sweet, with a perfectly pitched video. It recounts a date as a scientific experiment from hypothesis to conclusion. It mixes the science into the poetry seamlessly.
  • ‘Symphony’ is an amazing interactive poetry project: Ross wrote a poem, it was translated into different languages and various people playing the Hide and Seek weekender had to find people to translate it back. And Sutherland reads both his original poem and the resulting translated poem, both to the same elegant music and affecting video. Both poems are wonderful, steeped in the sounds and feelings of London, but the best bits are definitely where the translations differ massively and comically.
  • But by far Sutherland’s strongest poem in my eyes (and the strongest of the night) was an uproarious and poignant poem that worked as a meditation on death and the ‘trappings of grief’ while also perfectly describing the action of the opening credits of The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air that played behind him. Flawlessly imagined and performed, it was equal parts heart-rending and heart-warming.

Summary

A very entertaining night that reflected very favourably on LPS, Ferment and the growing genre of multimedia spoken word, with only some inaccessible videos letting the side down. I recommend you check out LPS’s events and buy Ferment. Go do that now.

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Saboteur Awards 2012

In Blogzines, Magazine, online magazine, Saboteur Awards on February 14, 2012 at 2:35 pm

Vote here!

This year we’re going to do things differently, and leave the choice of winner down to you, the reader. In this post we feature all of the literary magazines we’ve reviewed on Sabotage since 30th April 2011. Voting will close on 30th April 2012 at midnight, with results revealed on 1st May 2012 to celebrate Sabotage‘s 2nd Birthday.

The Saboteur Awards exist to celebrate literary magazines be they online or in print. To read all about our 2011 winners go here. There are no monetary prizes, however, the winning magazine editor(s) will be interviewed for a feature on Sabotage Reviews, they will receive a logo to put on their website, and bask in the knowledge that they are appreciated.

We encourage you to read the reviews and read the magazines before you vote. Who knows, you may discover your new favourite publication that way! The magazines in the running this year are (in no particular order):

Fantastique Unfettered
New Linear Perspectives
Ilk
Night and Day
Five Dials
Mythic Delirium
Curbside Quotidian
Mudluscious
Used Furniture Review
Paper Darts
Brittle Star
Anon
Armchair/Shotgun

Voting is now open!

Click here to cast your vote!

Voters are encouraged to leave comments explaining their choice.

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Fantastique Unfettered #4: Ralewing

In Magazine on February 1, 2012 at 10:00 am

-Reviewed by Annabella Massey-

Fantastique Unfettered, Issue 4

Fantastique Unfettered describes itself in its mission statement as a ‘Periodical of Liberated Literature [which exists] to provide well-written, compellingly readable, original stories of fantasist fiction to readers.’ This is a relatively new print magazine – just a year old – and ‘Ralewing’ is their landmark anniversary issue. Undeniably, the quality of the pieces in Fantastique Unfettered varies hugely, but this is often forgivable in such a young magazine, and the editors certainly seem to have the enthusiasm and commitment required to take this publication further. They already have large-scale plans drawn up for 2012: an issue titled ‘Shakespeare Unfettered’ is on the agenda, as is the launch of an Aether Age e-zine (www.aether-age.com).

The introductions inform us that death is the theme of ‘Ralewing’, although the significance of this doesn’t shine through in any distinctive way. The featured writers don’t fundamentally lack imagination, but many of the pieces would benefit from some strict rewriting. Some of the poems, in particular, feel like first drafts and they risk coming across as unnecessarily grandiose or even juvenile. For example, Dan Campbell’s ‘‘cubus’ begins in an understated enough manner (‘the eyes are all I have’), but the monologue grows more unsubtle and more unsurprising the longer the speaker waxes on:

‘I want.

and I will have.

they say, while I watch

them writhe, that I am tender,

that I yield when I ought

be firm, withhold

when I should pay.’

Like Campbell, many of these writers have a penchant for fairy-tale creatures, mythological beings and folklore-ish elements (see ‘Three Tales of the Devil’s Wife’ by Carmen Lau), but these figures and themes often feel underdeveloped and their implementation rather derivative. The genre hasn’t always been inverted, transcended or made new. Instead, it often seems to be a limitation in itself, and a number of these authors fall back on irregular archaisms or haphazardly inflated language: ‘“I can sell anything,” he said, the words a statement of fact, not remotely braggadocio or hubris.’ (Alma Alexander, ‘The Butterfly Collection of Miss Letitia Willoughby Forbes’). That said, the terse dystopia laid out in ‘The Bachorum Principal’ by Brenda Stokes Barron is economic and compelling:

‘Tenant #1: Numerica shall be a land of remembering and forgetting. […] I catalogue their sour kisses in my mind like our ancestors recorded dates of birth in moleskin journals and hand-me-down Bibles.’

Georgina Bruce’s short story, ‘Mr. White Umbrella’, also stands out—it’s direct, sharp and well edited, with an understated self-awareness that some of the other pieces can lack (though on a minor note, I’m not keen on the ‘Some time… One time… Another time… Lots of times…’ tags which begin each new section of the story):

‘The problem with Kiko is she thinks she’s some kind of a hero, with her big spiky black pigtails, enormous desert boots and stripey Alice tights.’

In this issue of Fantastique Unfettered, it’s the interviews and discussions that are conducted with particular flair. Alexandra Seidel speaks to three writers (Hal Duncan, Brent Weeks and Mike Allen) in depth, displaying a very real and comprehensive knowledge of their works and always asking focused and pertinent questions. The editors made an excellent decision in retaining the length of the responses instead of condensing them down into clichéd sound-bites: the authors give personable, entertaining and perceptive replies, and this section of the magazine is certainly worth a close read. Duncan’s standpoints may not be to everyone’s liking, but he is undeniably incisive and wonderfully eloquent:

‘[A] poet is anyone who writes poems, and a poem is any linguistic construct presented as a poem, exploiting potential import effects besides those covered under the rubric of semantics. That should allow for even the most experimental and conceptual approaches; and if it doesn’t I’m more than happy to broaden it.’

In Duncan’s own short story, ‘Sons of the Law’, the opening narrator pieces together a fragmented saloon tale out of scraps he finds in his grandfather’s old manuscripts and journalistic notes: ‘The Wild West was born where fact ends and fantasy begins’. Different voices then take up the telling: the showgirl, the slave, the drifter, the killer, and so on. For Duncan, ‘The Wild West is the pre-eminent mythscape of the modern era […] Every wandering gunslinger is an angel in Sodom’, and his wry treatment of the genre and the way he dissects the construction of a legend is offbeat and a lot of gritty fun.

Ultimately, Fantastique Unfettered is a friendly and encouraging platform for authors who flirt with (or fully embrace) genre writing. Some of the contributors rely much more on the conventions of these genres than others, but the magazine will hopefully develop and improve the longer it stays in production. What’s more, it’s uniquely informative: the interviews are insightful, and one could come away with an extensive reading list after flicking through this publication. William Browning Spencer, Hope Mirrlees, Thomas Ligotti, Søren Kierkegaard and G.K.Chesterton, among others, are all alluded to at various points; Fantastique Unfettered knows its audience well and tailors its recommendations accordingly. If the overall quality of the creative content were to be brought up to scratch, this publication could easily become a valuable resource for both writers and fans of the fantastical.

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Night and Day #3

In Magazine, online magazine on December 8, 2011 at 10:30 am

-Reviewed by Chris Emslie-

This magazine, an offshoot of Vintage Books (they’re the ones who affix pretty, minimalist red-and-white covers to all the books you feel like you should have read by now), is interesting because it strays from the conventional literary magazine model. Yes, it offers a variety of prose and poetry, set alongside disarmingly old-fashioned illustration and decoration. Yes, its target market is unabashedly literary – Philip Birch’s article on escaping the drear of administrative work at a publishing house reflects this. However, this is not the lit mag many readers may expect. Night and Day are indeed delivering new literature, but their vehicle is distinctly journalistic. Eley Williams’s ‘Synaesthete, Would Like To Meet’ is a charming opening piece, though its cerebral first-person often blurs the line between short fiction and human interest column. The story is certainly warm and engaging, and its deliberately personal account of neurological synaesthesia is a sensitive progression from the fascination writers like Meaghan Delahunt have previously had with the condition.

The issue’s subtitle, ‘States of Mind’, flits in and out of the pieces. Psychoanalyst Stephen Grosz recounts a professional encounter in which a patient mistakes nostalgia for her child’s dependence on her for sexual dissatisfaction. To attribute these misidentified yearnings – both innately physical – to states of mind teeters on the edge of patronising. That’s not to mention the nonchalance with which defunct Freudian overtones are evoked and then dismissed. The “misread[ing]” of a state of mind that Grosz hands down to the reader in this article is perhaps more distressing than his revelatory tone suggests.

The next piece concerns a different Freud altogether – the late, great painter Lucian Freud. In his interview with one of Freud’s last sitters, Ria Kirby, Rob Sharp explores more of the ageing artist’s relationship with his model(s) than either his or Kirby’s state of mind. Freud’s old reputation of course surfaces, but what Sharp gleans is more a retrospective on how posing nude for the canvas affected Kirby’s daily routine and which social engagements Freud invited her to. This article feels more like fond gossip than any sort of psychic interrogation of the artist-sitter dynamic.

‘The Lives of Others’, an excerpt from a forthcoming novel by Neel Mukherjee, is stark and affecting. Despite becoming bogged down in its own language, this snapshot of absolute hopelessness is undeniably harrowing. Its detachment from reality is what gives the matter-of-fact prose its force: the protagonist’s “practised farmer’s hand” bringing a sickle down on his wife’s neck is chilling because it is so calm. Mukherjee details three murders without flinch or hysteria. He gives his character no alternative. What this excerpt distils into is the horrid but inescapable logic that comes when agency is wholly stripped away.

I am sure this will reveal tremendous bias on my part, but there is not enough poetry in this third issue of Night and Day. We are offered two poems by Toby Martinez De Las Rivas and two by Rachael Allen. The former are set alongside a three-line excerpt from a longer poem by Lisa Jarnot – an excerpt which is strong enough to be called insufficient in this context. De Las Rivas gives us two incredibly dense texts. The first is ‘Untitled’, a ten-line breeze block of cultural sniping. De Las Rivas disparages “these heaving galleries, / rats in tortoiseshell nerd-glasses” with a surprising amount of venom, foreseeing “hell as it really is” in “Purcell’s death chants piped over the duct-taped rubble”. By the end of the poem its strongest idea – the “tenacity of loss” – is almost buried under De Las Rivas’s vented spleen.

His second poem, ‘Singsong’, is more welcoming, though a little uncertain of its own shape. Images like “the spectral disk of each iris” are perhaps too inflated for their subject matter, but De Las Rivas recovers his charm in the poem’s more grounded moments: “Lá, d’you remember how the rain stumbled down on us, / and we dumped the others and scuttled home through it.” The poem then veers off again into a high, almost scriptural register, and only settles again in its final moments, having passed through Gateshead, Massachusetts and Northumberland to rest on the “arc of winter, deathbell, apostle of pine trees and snow”. This final trio of images cools De Las Rivas’s linguistic fever and recalls the Norwegian poet Tarjei Vesaas, which seems all too appropriate at this time of year.

Rachael Allen’s poems are much more direct. In this case, their openness and immediacy is refreshing. ‘Milestones’ gives an account of a stillbirth that is arresting because of Allen’s clever manipulation of the narrative space. The truth of the lines is not realised until around the third stanza, in one of those rare (and usually heartbreaking) moments that the reader is prompted to stop and re-read the line in an awful surge of understanding. The baby enters the poem “half-done, swollen and shining” and “dark as petrified wood”. Allen’s invocation of the mythical ferryman Charon is slightly heavy-handed but the images here are generally thoughtful and delicately expressed. The poem ends soberly and without much ado, “before we’d even begun / to let you go.”

Allen’s second offering is thankfully lighter. The almost-caricature of a waiter “opening up his grinning arms / to the erect pepper grinder, as large / as his leg” fuels an incisive exploration of the (presumably male) speaker’s sexual anxiety. The poem, candidly titled ‘Impotence’, is insightful without descending into mockery or humour for humour’s own sake. This awareness of the absurd and its intersection with real life gives the poem a credibility that is harder to achieve than it might appear. Allen’s final lines rescue the poem from its own comic trap:

“[...]Glancing around, I chew
in questions, everyone around us has taken
everything to talk about so that suddenly, after
years, we have nothing to say.”

The third issue of Night and Day presents an intriguing intersection of literature and journalism, one that poses questions about how we define the term ‘literary magazine’. Its aesthetic is consistent and appealing, but often proves distracting from the content itself. While the mix of poetry, prose and nonfiction here is healthy, anecdotal articles and photographic peeks into creative workspaces seem to water it down.  Ultimately, there is a feeling of art taking the back seat in this issue. I welcome a communal forum for literature and journalism, but it should be on even ground – the space afforded to the arts is shrinking fast enough as it is.

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Five Dials #21

In Magazine, online magazine on November 25, 2011 at 1:48 pm

-Reviewed by Barry Tench-

Five dials is a downloadable PDF literary journal from Hamish Hamilton and your first impression of this worthy publication will probably be that it is beautifully presented. Let me warn you, however, that if you intend to print it out it’s a good idea to get an extra black ink cartridge in as your printer will be sorely tested on issue 21, especially on Kid Koala’s graphic project extract ‘Space Cadet’. Issue 21 is also decorated with poetic illustrations by Lizzy Steward. Editor Craig Taylor hopes that the issue will be printed up and placed on a bar alongside bowls of peanuts, a sentiment I echo.

Craig Taylor’s bouncy and irreverent editorial sets the tone “the sound of people trying to pull the metal shutters from the front of the Brixton Foot Locker.” That spirit of the blitz he conveys is reflected in a series of essays with London post codes as titles. Under its remit of ‘currentish events’ we have  London/riots related pieces from Helen Conford and Bojana Gajski that read like videos shot on a mobile phone, slightly out of focus and grainy but with the personal insight that takes the reader directly onto the streets, be they in Whitechapel or Montenegro. These essays lead to Daniel Smith’s traumatic walk through a wartime London with an emotionally distressed Virginia Woolf, there is something uniquely disturbing about what Woolf calls ‘street haunting’.

Five Dials often has a theme and issue 21 is subtitled ‘Rock School’ which made me half expect the appearance of Jack Black from the pages hollering “If You are Hardcore”. I was disappointed, but that was the one and only time as I flipped through the ezine. Under the moniker of ‘The Best Bits of the Best Books’ various “rockers, rappers and folkies”  select some of their favourite books;  most of them  read whilst  in the back of the tour bus or in some cheap and nasty motel. It is an intriguing selection – Vonnegut, Bolano and Herman Hesse among others. I loved Adam Green’s description of William S Burroughs as “a gay R Kelly”. These contributions not only made me want to dig out my copy of The Naked Lunch again but also listen to the music of some of the witty and insightful reviewers.

Then there are the three short stories of Jonas Hassen Khemiri- the Danish novelist. Hassen  Khemiri references jazz quite a lot, but his stories feel more like the blues. They have a rhythm of the blues with a strong refrain especially in ‘An Attempt at Nuclear Physics’ with its repetition of “you’ll” that gives it the effect of an I-woke-up-this-morning and my wife and dog  have left me kinda blues. ‘Control Alt. Delete’ has four uneasy compositions and ‘Unchanged Unending’ displays that same elliptical style of a writer who shows great control over his narrative.

Other ephemera include a shopping list of knitting titles that neatly references Neil Young, a Raymond Chandler story/anecdote and a poem by Heathcote Williams ‘Being Kept by a Jackdaw’: a folkloric tale that reads more like a short story.

However, my personal highlight was Alexander Larman’s review of J. K. Huysmans 1884 novel ‘Against Nature’, an observation on “dandyism, decadence and debauchery.” His highly entertaining review made me want to go and find some musty independent bookshop hidden away down a dark alley somewhere in Shoreditch dressed in a big collar and floppy hat. So with Issue 21 tucked under my arm I’m off to a dive populated by bleary-eyed journos and yet-to-be-discovered artists to sip absinth and wallow in melancholia.

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Mythic Delirium #24

In online magazine, Magazine on August 21, 2011 at 7:52 pm

 -Reviewed by Tori Truslow-

Not infrequently, I come across people who are perplexed by the idea of poetry having genres. I suspect some of these people are those who believe that ‘genre’ and ‘literary’ are mutually exclusive. Mythic Delirium, a biannual subscription-based magazine of fantasy, SF and horror poetry, cheerfully puts paid to that yawnsome debate. Its 24th issue contains some damn fine – finely crafted, finely balanced, finely nuanced – poetry; it also, in good speculative tradition, feels like an adventure from the get-go. Editor Mike Allen, in his introduction, lays out a trajectory for the issue: ‘we’ll begin with planets and aliens, shift into the stuff of myth, zip out into alternative futures and curve through alternate histories before finally descending into mediations on the very nature of stories.’ Although there are plenty of places to pause and reflect on the nature of stories and poems earlier on, too.

One thing that becomes apparent quite quickly is that this is a publication for those who like a strong dose of story in their poetry. Hurrah, I say. Burying a story under precarious piles of images can work very well – and there are a few examples here of poems where the what’s-going-on needs to be teased out, like Nima Kian’s lovely, lingering ‘A Semblance’ (‘people sit/at the edge of their prayers below/black clouds that cannot rain’) – but style doesn’t have to negate narrative. The second poem in the issue, ‘The Wine of Mercury’ by Joshua Gage, has just the right balance of both. The poem begins with a technical history of human attempts to terraform Mercury, the language dry and technical:

‘But the deadly crust is rich in helium-3,

enough to fuel a fleet of torch ships.

The soil also abounds in iron, titanium

and magnesium ores.’

This changes, as the planet is colonised and it is discovered that grapevines ‘thrive’. The register becomes lush, full of echoes of Earth’s myths and literatures. Wine is made; one is tellingly described as ‘earthy’ in flavour. In the poem’s vision of space exploration, some things don’t change – we still love a good wine, and we still invent wonderfully precious ways to describe its flavours – but leaving our home planet shifts the way we see, feel, and taste, and this shift is marked in the way the poem describes pleasure. The narrator lists Mercury’s wines, their growing conditions and their flavours, including those of the ‘Boccaccio Estate’, whose

‘…signature is “Decameron,”

a Primitivo grown from old world vines

from southern Italy, rich with the hint

of a naked kiss after a year-long stint

in space against a background of tart cherry.’

I can’t help but read this as a story about science-fictional poetry itself, moving from hard science-language to a headier mix of the technical and the mythic, synthesising space-images with ‘earthy’ ones and carrying old human passions across new frontiers.

Elsewhere in the issue the storytelling waxes whimsical, poems offering flights of fancy with dark, toothy things lurking in their corners. ‘Behind the Greasepaint Door’ by Marcie Lynn Tentchoff is a rhymeless ballad about a questing mime that faces something terrible in the land ‘Where Carneys End’. ‘The Last Dragon Slayer’ by Elissa Malcohn mixes prose-poetry and verse, and from its first lines clearly does not intend to play nicely with the dragon-slaying hero trope: ‘She is the wet dream of every budding knight, the centerpiece of every quest. Her scaly head on a pike makes the ultimate maiden magnet.’ In all these poems the central figure is changed irrevocably by journeying beyond what they’re used to; the reader, too, has their preconceptions of certain archetypes neatly twisted around.

Theodora Goss’s ‘Binnorie’ is short and sharp, and similarly upends a popular balladic motif: the bone harp, made of a murdered woman’s remains. ‘What is it about being made into a harp […] That presents such an appropriate allegory/For being a woman, and therefore an instrument/Of fathers, husbands, or sons?’ it asks. It then goes on to ask whether the harp is actually a metaphor for being a poet. Woman-writer and woman-as-muse clichés are bypassed entirely, and poetry is cast as a father, a husband, a son. The poem is formed in its entirety of two sentences, both questions, which don’t have quick answers; for me, this is the poem that lingered the longest after reading.

Other highlights were ‘Counterfactual Photos’ by Ian Watson, an intriguing alternate-reality concept played out over deceptively straightforward and regular three-line stanzas, and ‘Wisdom’ by Sonya Taaffe, a beautiful musing on Jewish folklore migrating to the big city; both are worth reading a couple of times over. Between those poems that danced and sparked and asked difficult questions, there were a few that simply lay flat for me, made all the more noticeable by the ones that did catch fire. The ones that didn’t stick in the memory, for me, had a certain sense of closedness, a feeling that they had told me what to think rather than leaving me with questions. But I wouldn’t say there was a bad poem among the 20 selected here.

Laying the merits of individual poems aside for a moment, the journey promised at the beginning is well-plotted; Allen is an excellent helmsman, steering his passengers between delight and darkness. To labour the metaphor, the black-and-white illustrations provide pleasing views along the way. And the culmination of the journey, the promised ‘meditations on the very nature of stories’ in the final three poems, is triumphant. ‘The true poem’ by Serena Fusek is light and fleet and pure magic, and perfectly complemented by its woodcut-ish illustrations. Here’s a taster:

‘The true poem

may seem slight

but the must of

wild mushrooms

and leaf mold

worm through the lines.’

Following it are two library-themed pieces. ‘Torn Out’ by Ann K. Schwader is another mix of prose and poetry, descriptive paragraphs followed by short snatches of stanzas, a form that suits its subject matter – something, we suspect vampiric, stalking prey in a closed library – very well; it’s what’s not said here that makes it so deliciously creepy. And then Shira Lipkin’s ‘The Library, After’ comes along, magical and wry, a prose poem about an abandoned library where the books ‘told each other to each other’. You could read this as whimsy, you could read it as a bit of thumb-biting in the direction of rigid genre classifications – “New genres formed and split and reformed, tangents spilling out like capillaries. Freed of the responsibility to be useful and to fit human desires and expectations, Story explored itself in Mandelbrot swirls” – whichever way you look at it, it’s clever, funny and affirming. Literary fashions come and go – as we learn, ‘The science-noir-unicorn genre was shortlived’ – but story keeps on going. The image of stories continuing to twist and transmute after we’ve stopped looking at them is a perfect note to end on.

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Curbside Quotidian #3

In Magazine, online magazine on August 17, 2011 at 6:48 pm

-Reviewed by Ian Chung-

There is a range of strong and enjoyable work to be found in Issue 3 of Curbside Quotidian, although the featured artwork in particular is quite diverse, and not all of it may appeal. Personally, I found the two strongest to be Inge Hoonte’s Simulated Travel and Eleanor Bennett’s Sleep Anywhere. The former is a very simple black surface, over which text marches from left to right and five dotted arrows run through the text from top to bottom. The visual impact verges on being clinically sparse, yet pay closer attention and details like how the dotted arrows cut through ‘i’s in the text will emerge, evoking the deeper organising principles underpinning the artwork. The crux of the piece then seems to be the last line of text, ‘get immobility bonus for not flying anywhere’, as Hoonte is interested in ‘how notions of privacy, identity, and behavioral routines shape the tension between reaching out and keeping one’s distance in interpersonal communication and physicality’.

Visually speaking, Bennett’s Sleep Anywhere is the complete opposite of Hoonte’s piece. The colours here are lush and vibrant, but what is most striking is that brilliant blue iris staring out of the top-right quadrant of the artwork. The other eye is not exactly obscured by leaf litter, but because it is still cast in shadow, what is a beautiful image is given a subtly disquieting feel, intentionally or otherwise, as if there were something off-kilter about it that yet cannot be pinned down with any certainty. This juxtaposition of moods finds an echo in one of the poems, Daniel Fitzsimmons’s ‘Underfoot’, which opens with the violently visceral (but sonically pitch-perfect in its alliteration) ‘A dead cardinal is crushed crimson’, yet closes with a measure of wistfulness:

‘and the swift-footed commuters

slowed for a moment to wonder

if the photos hanging on the walls

upstairs were black and white.’

The editors of Curbside Quotidian must also be commended for their lively sense of humour, which surely played a part in their choosing to publish a poem like Kevin Heaton’s ‘Castaway’. Poems concerning literary rejection may run the risk of sounding bitter, but Heaton’s poem deftly avoids this by approaching rejection from a subtly different perspective. Rather than writing a poem about rejection from the poet’s point of view, he goes a step further and imagines a poet rejecting a literary magazine’s request that he take out a subscription. Substitute a few nouns here and there, and the poem would read like any polite form rejection from an editor, which detractors might say is too gimmicky, but as a one-off, I find it quite ingenious. The shape of the poem on the screen also plays on this familiarity with rejection by editors, with indents drawing attention to phrases like ‘thoroughly / reviewed the work’ and ‘lacking / in laudable characteristics’.

It is in the fiction offerings though, that Issue 3 of Curbside Quotidian really shines. The element of humour is again displayed in a story like Yaki Margulies’s ‘Failed Expectations’, which imagines what would happen if God actually came back to Earth and started living a celebrity lifestyle, only to become fed up with humanity all over again. Zealots will probably take offense, but more level-headed believers should be able to appreciate the satire, especially given the rise of megachurches and their celebrity pastors. Also carrying on the religious theme is Christine Utz’s ‘Ingénue: A Girl in Three Parts’. The three-part structure of the story may be a nod to the concept of the divine Trinity, but its subject matter is strictly mortal. The love stories that unfold grow progressively weirder, and by the third section ‘3. The Herpetologist’, the narrator is in a relationship with what is clearly stated to be a lizard. Even leaving aside the metaphorical implications of shedding one’s skin (‘To ask him to claw me so my new skin could emerge, too.’), this narrative hangs together precisely because it is never self-conscious about its oddity, allowing the story to coast smoothly to its end.

On the other hand, Danny Lalonde’s ‘\A Simple Function\’ deliberately fractures language, repeatedly defining (or appearing to define) specific words at scattered intervals. There is something almost schizophrenic in the way these definitions are mixed together with the parsing of grammatical functions, snatches of Robert Frost’s ‘The Road Not Taken’, and the refrain ‘a space and then a line’. This effect is heightened by the story’s being narrated in the second person, a relatively uncommon choice, but which impels the reader to inhabit the story as it is being read. Finally, it is also worth pointing out that Nick Kowalczyk has an excellent non-fiction piece in Issue 3. ‘Dispatches From Home’ details through a mixture of anecdote and reportage Kowalczyk’s relationship to his hometown of Lorain, Ohio, and is an excerpt from a longer work that I would very much like to see in its completion.

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Brittle Star #27

In Magazine on August 4, 2011 at 11:05 am

-Reviewed by Ian Chung-

For a literary magazine that has been around for more than 10 years, Brittle Star’s online presence still feels curiously disorganised, despite the official website having been revamped in March 2010. A quick check with Google reveals that Issue 28 is already out and the magazine is reading for Issue 29, but on the magazine’s official website, clicking on a picture headed ‘Latest issue’ leads to a separate WordPress blog entry about Issue 27 (bizarrely, the actual URL ends in ‘/issue-24/’). Neither the blog nor the magazine’s Facebook and Twitter accounts have been updated since January 2011. If this were my favourite literary magazine, I would regard the effort required for keeping up-to-date with what it was doing as bordering on excessively complicated.

That said, it would be a shame if potential readers/subscribers missed out on Brittle Star because of this. For as Issue 27 proves, there is commendable work to be found in this slim magazine. The official website notes that Brittle Star ‘has earned a reputation for providing a platform for writers at the beginning of their careers, many of whom have seen their work in print for the first time’. In this issue, one such writer is Nick Boyes, whose poem ‘To a Slug’ strikes a balance between applying a child-like imagination to nature’s creatures (‘The ant is a Victorian strongman’) and deploying a more adult awareness (‘the hiding spider / is a cold war secret agent’, ‘you slug, you are a fat friendless child / who doesn’t know why’).

This knowingness also manifests itself in poems like Terry Jones’s ‘Birdsong’ and Michael Bartholomew-Biggs’s ‘A Beginner’s Guide to Fructiculture’. In ‘Birdsong’, ‘Their call-and-repeat-and-warn tapestries’ are immediately reinterpreted in the next line as ‘Sung territories of threat and feathered lust’. The sonic echoes in word pairs ‘tapestries’/‘territories’ and ‘threat’/‘feathered’ (with ‘repeat’ creating a visual triple) subtly reinforce the transformation of meaning. Although the poem closes with the apparently hopeful ‘Somewhere Cuckoo muscles into light’, in opposition to the evocative phrasing of ‘a dark rain of birdsong’, one wonders if a more ambivalent reading is not called for. The previous line (‘Rook guards his crown of thorns’) contains a Biblical allusion to the Crucifixion, which in turn points back to the rook’s folkloric association with death. Furthermore, many cuckoo species are brood parasites, laying their eggs in other birds’ nests, so the element of deceit further undercuts the attempt to read the ending as hopeful.

With ‘A Beginner’s Guide to Fructiculture’, Bartholomew-Biggs relocates the fruit of the Holy Spirit from Galatians 5 to a literal garden. The language of cultivation admirably sustains the conceit with startling ease, allowing the poet to play with both levels of meaning throughout the poem. While the final injunction concerning ‘Self-control’ is to ‘Prune away / extravagant growth’, this is surely not an issue for this poem. While the poem is not divided into stanzas, each attribute is economically dealt with in what almost feel like three-line aphorisms. Personal favourites follow:

Low-bush Kindnesses

are easy to pick. They bruise

with careless handling.

Small unassuming

Blossoms mark true Goodness from

Self-righteous hybrids.

Brittle Star also features short articles and literary fiction, and in this issue, Brittle Star intern Saskia Katarina Hidas’s article on the Norwegian poet Gunvor Hofmo is particularly interesting, drawing attention to a European post-WW2 poet who has been compared to Paul Celan and Emily Dickinson. However, in comparison to the featured poetry, the fiction largely feels like it falls short. Luke Thompson’s ‘Quick small steps’ is too chatty without seeming to go anywhere in the end. As for Michael Ranes’s ‘Jani and the boy’, it should just manage to avoid giving offense despite its unsubtle treatment of racial themes, seeing as there is always the excuse that the entire story is ultimately mediated through a biracial narrator. Even if that revelation feels more gratuitous than illuminating.

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