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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 Magazine, online 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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Anon #7

In Magazine on June 27, 2011 at 5:59 pm

-Reviewed by Chloe Stopa-Hunt-

Anon Magazine, reviewed by Chloe Stopa-Hunt

Around the halfway mark of Anon Seven is a short prose piece by Claire Askew, reflecting on the experience of reading poems ‘blind’ as a competition judge. Askew feelingly depicts the anxieties of the process – what if you recognise a friend’s style, or give all the prizes to the same person? – but the article is perhaps most interesting in its capacity as an implicit commentary on the magazine as a whole. The editors of Anon, like the judges of competitions, review their poetry submissions with no knowledge of the author: indeed, they proudly announce in the issue’s introduction that they have recently graduated to an automated anonymising system. The egalitarian benefits of such a review process do not need to be rehearsed at any length. Clearly, less-established or less-confident poets are probable beneficiaries: they need not be afraid to submit, and they are assured of unbiased consideration when they do. Askew moved me to wonder, however, whether there might also be disadvantages to the process. Anon Seven is an effervescent production, its poems spanning the world: from Dave Coates’ transfigured, strangely threatening ‘Leith’ (on the magazine’s doorstep, since Anon is produced in Edinburgh), to the detailed, tender surveillance of Lake Illiamna, Alaska, which Scott Edward Anderson undertakes in ‘Midnight Sun’. Its strengths lie in variety, and particularly in the sheer invention and craft of certain poems – sometimes, even, of especially successful lines, such as the opening of Richard Moorhead’s ‘I Shot A Bird’, which breaks upon the reader with a brash insistence that ‘Everyone should try some killing’.

I think, however, that Askew’s description of the free-wheeling, decontextualised world of anonymous reading is reflected in the magazine’s relatively light editorial touch. Each poem has been chosen on its own merits, but the results of such open-minded sifting do not always sit well side by side. Caroline Crew’s ‘Lambing Season’ is a good poem, fully deserving of publication (above all, its image of the farmer reshuffling his bereaved animals is compelling: ‘Giving orphans the dead’s fleeces / to fool a mother’s nostrils / with some scent of the living’), but its rural British aesthetic has little to say to the very different work of Emily Van Duyne, which follows. Van Duyne’s writing is both powerfully observational – a setter’s puppies are ‘strung like fat blunt / Christmas bulbs from fat blunt chocolate nipples’ – and animated by taut undercurrents of threat and yearning; it emerges, however, from a completely different poetic tradition to Crew’s.

If some marriages among the selection of poems are unsuccessful, others work better. William Gault Bonar’s ‘Sensing You’ concludes with the speaker ‘jammed on the motorway / listening to radio blether, trying / to pin down your smell, your taste’. Here, isolation and desperation are confined within relatively pared-down and prosaic lines, arranged in three brief quatrains: the narrator’s sense-exercise, that pinning down, feels obsessive but tightly controlled. In the poem that follows, Russel Swensen’s ‘Moonlight’, a much looser line structure, with no stanza breaks, holds sway. The poem is one attenuated sentence; gaps and pauses have infiltrated the lines, rather than regulating them. This verbal slipperiness comes to mirror the moon’s overdetermined, yet indefinite role in the poem, as interlocutor, muse, villain, lost one: the narrator says, ‘I would not confuse you Moon / is it true what they did to you’, but in fact the poem creates a managed confusion in which the same symbol can signify, from moment to moment, anything the speaker finds noteworthy or wishes to talk about. The poem really needs to be read in full, but an extract can hint at its cunningly oscillatory tones, moving between fractious colloquialism and slightly camp, slightly twitchy epic:

‘Moon I’m serious a sparrow
with folded wings & trembling:
Moon that falls through stories
like a rock through yarn Moon
that always escapes the enemy camp
on a stolen horse
that streaks its cheeks with blood
Moon that festers like the youngest son
in an ancient house

[…]

I could try to love you Moon that
is all talk tell me my favorite
story before I tell you yours you can
afford to be generous’

Anon Seven, reviewed for Sabotage by Chloe Stopa-HuntThis anxious, iterative intensity can be profitably read against the quiet desperation of William Gault Bonar’s narrator, because Swensen too is ‘pinning down’, albeit through a wholly different language register. In some instances, then, the contextless reading process has by no means stopped the creators of Anon Seven from assembling a selection of poems which, by their proximity, enrich the reading experience of each. There are even some recurrent ideas across the collection more widely: Marion McCready’s ‘Eyewitnesses’ and Juliet Wilson’s ‘Strangers’ are more than sixty pages apart, but they both counterpoise a deliberate playfulness with deadly serious intimations of disaster, even of concealed atrocities. Wilson’s poem sets up the cliché of two people’s eyes locking ‘across the room’ and sparking ‘electricity’, only to demolish it in the latter half of her tiny poem:

‘a sudden memory
of us hiding in an orange grove

as soldiers approached’

McCready’s tranquil winter scene is punctuated by italicised couplets, almost offhand – and there are only three of them, six lines of twenty-two – but all the more chilling thereby. ‘In another life / they ate my house with fire‘, the unnamed voice declares, and then: ‘They came while we were eating, / they came in twos and threes‘. Chloe Morrish’s poem, which accompanies a description of her experiences as a participant in the Clydebuilt apprenticeship scheme, also uses a playful revisionism to re-cast a scenario that might otherwise be too familiar to jaded readers. Written whilst on the scheme, and inspired by a painting of the Danaids, ‘Myth: (The Danaids’ Reply)’ stands as an example of successful workshopping, as well as a tough-minded and funny poem in its own right – reminiscent, I thought, of some of the pieces in Carol Ann Duffy’s The World’s Wife.

Several poets have contributed fresh-feeling nature poems, such as Jayne Fenton Keane’s ‘Garden Speech’, in which ‘A tincture of rain / revives eggish bodies – soil pocketed / frogs begin their slow uncoupling with earth’. The verbal music of these lines feels, itself, almost clogged with soil: the hard sounds of ‘g’ and ‘k’ combine with unexpected line breaks (‘soil pocketed / frogs’ would naturally be unsplit, and on the same line) to suggest at an aural level the awkwardness of a frog detaching itself from wet earth. Shivani Sivagurunathan offers a vision more inflected by sublimity in ‘Natural History’, a poem in which times of natural disaster – when ‘the sky / collapses and the equator / trembles like unfurled string’ – are preceded by heightened moments, when ‘certain tree trunks / look more serious, more silver’. This attention to the numinous is also apparent in John Glenday’s ‘Imagine you are driving’, the last poem in the issue. Taken from the poet’s new collection, Grain, this piece follows a short interview with Glenday (an interview worth reading, in particular for the poet’s comic insights into his writing process and the wider literary world of events and reviews), and is – unsurprisingly – one of the most honed and impressive pieces in the magazine. It displays an interpretive sympathy with nature which swiftly deepens into something more definitely reflective, and more poignant. The last few lines showcase the effectiveness of controlled negation in the hands of a gifted poet, and conclude Anon Seven on a high note of poetic craft:

‘So you drive on, hopeful of a time

when the ocean will rise up before you like dusk
and you will make landfall at last–
some ancient, long-forgotten mooring, perhaps,
which both of you, of course, will recognise;

though as I said before, there is no one beside you
and neither of you has anywhere to go.’

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Armchair/Shotgun: Issue 2

In Magazine on June 10, 2011 at 12:15 pm

-Reviewed by Rory O’Sullivan-

For the uninitiated, Armchair/Shotgun is a biannual compendium of contemporary fiction, poetry, visual art and authorial insight. It is published by a team of active writers operating out of New York, and the journal prides itself in having no regard for the credibility or background of its contributors.

Armchair / Shotgun Issue 2's front cover

As its submissions page claims, “Good writing does not know one MFA program from another. It does not know a PhD from a high school dropout…and it does not care what you have written before. Good writing knows only story.”

Indeed it is difficult to ignore the importance this journal places upon the purity of ‘story’, such is its ability to distract, grip and absorb you. Many of the pieces illustrate grassroots story-telling at its very best – with three contributors making their début bow – and there is a freshness and a spice to this collection that brings to mind the originality of the Beat generation.

All the while, however, there is a certain darkness that underpins the thematic basis of this edition of Armchair/Shotgun. Martyrdom, paternal jealousy, entrapment, escapism, conflict, redneck family strife: these are just some of the themes at work here.

Convinced he is leaving his troubles behind, adolescent Wes Spires sets off on a petulant escape through the southern states in Jason Culpepper’s ‘Hammer Lane’, a short story on which the edition closes. Derelict small-town streets, nosy sheriffs and oppressive heat form the backdrop to an uncomfortable journey that has no end. Wes dodges his way from one stolen car to the next as he presses forward, weaving between one interstate and the next. But for what end-game neither the protagonist nor reader ever know.

Building on the theme of insecurity through unenviable existence, Martin Shackleford invites us to feel pity for his protagonist, John Peters, in ‘The Kill Sign’. John is a desperate character whose miserable sex life is compounded by his dog’s rampant ‘seeing-tos’ of a poodle belonging to a stripper in the nextdoor trailer. A stripper whom, predictably, John tries – and fails – to get into bed with. As John exclaims to his testosterone-fuelled pet,

“You can’t keep doing this,” I tell him. “It’s no way to behave,” I say. “You know,” I finally let out, “you’re fucking my operation up something fierce.”

The Naturalistic parallel between Man and beast is an obvious one, but provides a subtle and timely humour: the world of trailer-trash tail-chasing that Shackleford creates so vividly through his characters’ struggle is hosed down by the frankly hilarious sympathy we have to concede for John’s hapless state of affairs.

Albeit through an unsettling bloodbath, the virtue of self-worth is explored in Kevin Brown’s ‘The Long Short Road’. It follows the plight of a young boxer who, after years of fighting repression at his father’s hands, encounters the wrath of his girlfriend’s jealous ex-lover. The graphic description as he crawls towards the lights of a village in the dusty, hot night after taking a deep stab wound to the gut points towards a gruesome ending. However, our victim stops – bent double and clutching his bleeding belly – to envisage himself back in the ring. But rather than confronting the man who thrust the blade into his body, it is his father upon whom he imagines exacting revenge, “Meeting his eyes, I raise my guard and move forward, and in the center of the ring, we come together as warriors.”

Four miniature collections of poems and prose poems are interspersed between the short stories – each section ‘signposted’ by quirky etchings of rural and urban charts that come as a pleasant surprise. However, there is little respite from the dark tone.

Alanna Bailey makes a total of five contributions in verse: she kicks off with a chilling ode to her grandmother in ‘Grandma’, tracking her demise from the physical (“Saw the road maps of / wrinkles deepen down your forearms”) to the mental (“you / couldn’t find your son’s name in your mouth”).

In my favourite of hers, ‘But We Didn’t Wear Black’, death is dealt with indirectly, focusing on the effect of someone’s passing away on people they never knew. The canons that appear between the second line of one stanza and the first line of the next are thrown up as deliberate obstacles, helping create an appropriate sense of awkward distraction and an unwillingness to move forward.

Readers will also enjoy two pieces of visual art: one, an excerpt from Sono Osato’s Silent Language, No. 6 and, two, a photo essay – Someplace – by Cory Schubert. And there isn’t a knife or a trailer camp in sight.

Schubert offers a collection of eight photographs of Los Angeles – one of which bleeds across the front cover of this issue – and they convey an unmistakable absence of human life. Osato’s excerpt explores the relationship between language and topography, and you have to inspect it at close quarters in order to fathom its components and their purpose. The interview that introduces it here offers a few clues, but I would be cautious not to be sucked in by her – at times, pretentious – wanderings as to what makes a viable piece of art.

A profile of Jesse Ball is also featured. One of the journal’s editors, Kevin Dugan, gives a laudatory and accessible account of the author’s life and work. The bias for choosing Ball to ‘endorse’ this edition is rather blatant. His pure fascination with originality and his eccentric means of extracting it (we are told he urges his students to partake in derizes, a type of aimless wandering that helps free the creative mind, while also conducting seminars in courtroom fashion in order to probe the genesis of ideas) are more than just a nod to the refreshing originality contained within this issue of Armchair/Shotgun.

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New Linear Perspectives (Subversion Edition, April 2011)

In Magazine on April 30, 2011 at 10:38 am

-Reviewed by Ian Chung-

New Linear Perspectives (NLP) is a Scotland-based literary arts and culture journal, edited by Andrew F. Giles and Claudia Massie. The site clearly intends to be comprehensive in its coverage of different aspects of culture, with a growing archive that already features art and film reviews, photography, as well as a variety of new writing that ranges from poetry to travel writing, short stories to mini-essays. April’s Subversion edition draws from the diversity of the journal, bringing together a review of Chengdu-based artists by Allan Harkness, two parts of an ongoing graphic tale by Chris Pritchett, and two short stories by Andrew McCallum Crawford.

Harkness’s piece on the artists at Blue House Studios is a follow-up to his earlier post at NLP, which is a compilation of the artists’ interview responses in which they explain the motivations that lie behind their creations. In this edition of NLP, Harkness proceeds to place the individual Chengdu artists in the wider context of a ‘Chinese painting faced with the end of modernity, with rampant technological rationalism and with the further prospect of postmodern epistemologies (phenomenology, deconstruction and multi-perspectivalism) rather than simply the issue of construction of an artworld infrastructure and market (currently so dominant in Beijing and Shanghai)’. While this is an interesting discussion, I suspect it may not necessarily appeal to readers who do not themselves already possess an interest in contemporary Chinese art. That said, the samples of artwork featured by NLP can be appreciated in their own right, especially the two works from Zhou Chunya’s Green Dog series, which are disturbing in the way they are simultaneously familiar (because they are dogs) and alienating (because they are so vividly green).

Described as ‘approach[ing] architecture from a dark-tinted viewpoint and evok[ing] a brand new, exciting netherworld for this discipline’, Pritchett’s The Keystone is an unconventional tale about Sisyphus, an architect who wants to tear down the Pumphuset in Uppsala, Sweden, and erect a new monument in its place. All for the city’s benefit, of course. In this edition of NLP, Part III lays out Sisyphus’s rationale for his grand project, while Part IV hints at further mysteries to come in connection with secrets the Chancellor is hiding and the gravestone that Sisyphus kneels at as he says, ‘I miss you. I miss you so much.’ The black-and-white artwork of the series is moderately stylised and its attention to detail stunning. One minor complaint I have is that the dialogue occasionally sounds forced, and a number of spelling errors have crept into the text too.

NLP calls Crawford’s two stories ‘short, sharp snapshots of relationships and macabre goings-on that are at once menacing and human’. This is accurate, although I would qualify the description by noting the stories pull it off with different degrees of success. In ‘Mac & Wills’, the central question initially appears to be whether the titular characters are a couple or not. Yet by the end of the story, the unnamed narrator confesses, ‘We never did work out if he and Mac were a couple. Nobody cared. Not really.’ Those last two statements are instructive, since there seems to me a danger of them not becoming fully developed characters, being described in reductive terms like ‘He hated lots of things’ (Mac) or ‘He was usually pissed, in a Brideshead Revisited sort of way’ (Wills). This makes it somewhat difficult to truly care about what goes down in the Astoria that makes Wills punch Mac with a sound ‘like a large cabbage hitting a wet floor’.

Finally, ‘Yin Eyes’ presents a writer living in a dilapidated basement flat with no heating, drinking weak tea made from reused tea bags and water ‘free of live bacteria’ (a small comic moment in an otherwise bleak story). This story is effective because rather than trying to compress whole lives into a single pivotal moment like ‘Mac & Wills’ does, what we get is a comparatively narrow slice in time, which opens up into a wider picture of the anonymous writer’s life. While he does not get up to much apart from making tea, listening to his next-door neighbour cry, and clearing away a dead cat, incidental details dropped in (‘The bags were a gift from the previous tenant’, ‘She sounded inconsolable, as she did every night’) hint at the possibility of human connection amidst (or in spite of) the seeming mundanity of his life. Even the closing line offers a gracefully understated moment of hope: ‘He felt himself smiling, although he was trying hard not to climb into hopes of a thaw.’

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Thieves Jargon #205

In Magazine on April 22, 2011 at 6:53 am

-Reviewed by Ian Chung-

 Thieves Jargon is a monthly online literary journal that has been running for nearly seven years now, producing more than 200 issues in that time. An in-house press has also been set up, which publishes work by writers who have been featured in Thieves Jargon. Their editorial manifesto lists an eclectic range of influences, including among others, Charles Bukowski, William S. Burroughs, Roald Dahl, Dahiell Hammett, and Stephen King. In the case of Issue #205, it seems that a good deal of the featured work is in the vein of the first two writers’ (for lack of a better phrase) transgressive mode, which understandably may put some potential readers off.

This would be unfortunate, however, as there are some strong pieces in this issue. One such is Adam Moorad’s ‘Saint Luc’, an effective example of how a writer can set his readers up to expect a story’s given scenario to play out in a certain way, only to entirely subvert that midway through. Moorad’s story opens with a couple in a hotel, expecting a baby (‘”I feel more pregnant than before,” Trudi said.’), and also apparently waiting for a wedding dress to be delivered (‘”I’m from bridal shop,” he said. “Prince et Princesse. You called about a dress?”’). I will not elaborate on what they actually receive because that would be a big spoiler, but I will say the revelation has the effect of completely changing how one perceives the characters and their situation, with the matter-of-fact narration now becoming rather chilling:

‘I read the French Do Not Disturb sign and looped it around the doorknob. Then I             closed the door and set the bucket down on the dresser.

…
“I guess there’s no turning back now,” she said, and she took a sip of cola.

…

We squirreled around for a while, and I waited.’

Kristine Ong Muslim’s flash fiction, ‘Quarter of a Body’, is also a highly effective example of the form. Its content would seem to put it squarely in the body horror genre (‘This time, that missing part, the fourth one shunned since birth, would have grown limbs by now.’), but in the space of just over 100 words, the flash evolves into an incisive comment on society and its inability to welcome what falls outside its own norms: ‘A creature this unstructured is built to last. It will look for the other three-fourths, the one accepted by society, the one which had a mother and a father just like the ones before it. Soon, it will learn to identify its prey. Soon, it will want a name.’

The poetry featured in Issue #205 also deals with themes that readers new to Thieves Jargon may not appreciate encountering. Gary Shipley is a first-time contributor to the literary journal, whose poem ‘Gunning on Empty’ is stunning in the way it combines imagery that is startlingly violent and yet productive of a macabre humour. Consider these lines from the poem:

‘Our depression was never sold in stores.

The idea was always an antiseptic gadget.
I went to see the tourists get gored:

It’s a meticulous way of being human.’

It is hard to deny that the idea of watching tourists being gored as a demonstration of one’s humanity is profoundly disturbing, but the violence of the sentiment is already somewhat undercut by a deadpan line like ‘Our depression was never sold in stores’. Depending on how you look at it, that line is either very funny or very sad. Possibly both. Regardless, it is part of a series of strong images that make the poem memorable reading.

On the other hand, veteran contributor Carl Miller Daniels’s poems embody a frank, in-your-face homoerotic sensibility that has been described in an interview linked from his biographical note as ‘pornographic willy-nillyness’. This is pretty accurate, since Daniels cannot seem to get away from phrases like ‘the sexy naked big-dicked college boy’ in the poem ‘that’s his summer diet’, hammering it home four times as if afraid the reader would miss it the first. The effect is unsubtle to the point of being not so much shocking as boring. What is frustrating is that Daniels’s poems do contain the potential to say something beyond the obvious, i.e. men masturbate. For example, although ‘nesting’ begins typically with ‘two cute big-dicked young men’, the next line is ‘climb into bed together’. When further on ‘one guy pretends to remain asleep / while the other guy is busily / jerking off beside him’, that earlier ‘together’ certainly seems to beg the question, why this pretence? Something more is being hinted at here, but as it never gets developed further, the poem literally subsides into an opaque, post-coital ‘silence’.

Of course, there is absolutely nothing wrong with writing gay erotic poems. In the manifesto though, the editors quote Beckett: Every word is like an unnecessary stain on silence and nothingness. Judged by this standard, it is hard to argue for Daniels’s work as being necessary, since it tends to read more like the stuff of pornographic wish-fulfilment. So if you want my personal advice in this case? Skip these poems and read something by Thom Gunn or Mark Doty instead, who write more satisfying (and sexier) gay-themed poetry. The rest of Thieves Jargon Issue #205, however, is definitely still worth having a look at. The writing is likely to polarise readers, but I would say that is an achievement to be proud of in any case.

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