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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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eFiction Magazine #12

In Magazine on April 17, 2011 at 9:54 pm

-Reviewed by Kurage Kobayashi-

eFiction Magazine is a monthly publication that can be read online at efictionmag.com. The magazine, however, is eclipsed by the surprisingly active and friendly site maintained by eFiction authors where the emphasis is on helping fellow writers to grow in craft and style. These contributors describe themselves as:

“…a group of writers, editors, and otherwise fiction-loving people who work together to learn everything that is interesting about stories and use that knowledge to put together a monthly magazine.”

The site is clean and easy to explore. On it are discussions on self publishing, book marketing, and a forum called The Coffee Shop where one is encouraged to “grab a cup of coffee and hang out for a bit”, figuratively, of course. It strikes me as a safe environment in which the creative learning process can be made less intimidating and experimentation is welcome, comparable to a virtual cooking class.

eFiction Magazine #12, March 2011, reviewed by Kurage Kobayashi for Sabotage

Of the seven pieces in the March issue the majority are flash fiction which is, by definition, often spare and unfinished. Considering the warm workshop atmosphere of eFiction’s online forums these stories could be further peer reviewed, edited and expanded upon in the future.

Jordan Hart in ‘Withdrawl’ presents us with a short and swift retelling of the Rumpelstiltskin tale as viewed through the lens of a blackout alcoholic. The piece is clever if self aware. It reads as a set up for a long and involved joke, something Roald Dahl would delight in spinning out and prolonging until the reader is left anxious for relief. Hart, however, sucker punch-lines us almost immediately, leaving us unsatisfied and feeling a bit cheated, much like his story’s pitiable protagonist.

Of the flash fiction the most deft and entertaining is Z.J. Woods’s ‘A Breach of Warranty’. In a short span Woods introduces us to a world where children meet in secret to engage their parents’ HouseholdHelper Modular Automata in gladiatorial combat. There is a playfulness to Woods’s tone and word choice that makes up for the overwhelming crush of characters (four robots and three children). When the lighthearted romp takes a darker turn into the philosophy of electronic life and death the reader is drawn headfirst with the characters on the page.

Two pieces in this collection cross the line from flash fiction into short story territory, one of which is the true standout work of this edition. In ‘All of us and all of the moments of our lives’ by J. Eric Miller we are made privy to a private and fully formed world, the universe inside the protagonist’s head. We awake with our (regrettably anonymous) narrator to find both his bowels and brain in turmoil. While performing his morning rituals and complaining of his intestinal distress we are introduced through subtle and gentle clues to the time, place and persons involved in a complex relationship between two families with a shared son.

By keeping the arena of action entirely internal Miller expertly overlays a sense of hurtling progression and dread onto what is essentially a series of mundane events culminating in a severe mental breakdown. As such Miller’s work is the most whole and intriguing piece in the issue.

The longest piece, Aaron Wilson’s ‘The Return ofMelanplus Spretus, is a thematically ambitious and tightly plotted tale of man’s hubris and natural disaster.

Unfortunately the action built upon this steady foundation reads on the level of camp absurdism. Wilson concerns himself with a plague of locusts terrorizing a small Colorado farming community, consisting of stereotypical characters for whom it is difficult to feel sympathy. By far the most understandable character is the hoard of locusts itself.
With another round of editing Wilson could turn this into a fine and ominous tale, one that is half as long. He could use the reclaimed space to paint a less caricatured portrait of Colorado potato farmers so that there is a real sense of loss when disaster strikes.
If Wilson unintentionally descends into the realm of camp , the guest author, Jeff Baker, does so deliberately.

In his author spotlight interview Baker explains that ‘The Black Wind’ is an ode to Lovecraft. He then presents the tale of an academic’s descent into madness due to his obsession with a book, The Journal of Colonel William Fawcett: World Reknowned Explorer 1886and the bloodthirsty Amazonian deity described within. In classic Lovecraft fashion the story centers around the craven misbehavior of supposedly civilized men that is just as wildly over-inflated as the title of Fawcett’s journal.

Unfortunately Baker’s word choice is spotty, drifting between nineteenth century verbiage and twentieth century colloquialisms, and though there is plenty of book flinging action (books being smacked from hands, swept from tables) Baker never fully commits to the hysterics for which Lovecraft is so well known. If we are to have insane and ancient murderous urges, vile supernatural entities and vain academics, then give us also the absurd and delightful orgy of grotesque and baroque detail that can be found in, for example, corpses clawing their way through the basement walls of Herbert West – Reanimator.

In ‘Jazz Night’ Baker delivers a vignette that showcases his animator’s eye for action and visual flair. Baker uses the familiar trope of an ageing hitman out to prove his worth in order to showcase his flair for dramatic imagery and dynamic movement as well as his campy, pulp sensibility. Baker makes up for occasional missteps with clever noir labels for his futuristic world, people and places and the technologies employed by these characters. The action is visceral and logical and the characters are larger than life (the private police dress like Roman soldiers, the hitman is veined with cybernetic fibres). The world of New Venice is garish and dramatically lit, in the fashion of a comic book.

Baker’s work is fun, cemented in genre, and forgivably unoriginal. It is also representative of most of the pieces in the issue in that it feels unfinished. What is truly dismaying about eFictionis the number of typos littering this issue. But if overall the contents of eFiction’s March edition seem half-baked, they do so like a chocolate cake with a molten centre. After all, who hasn’t enjoyed licking the batter from the spoon? The joy of butter, raw egg and processed sugars is a delightful, if ultimately guilty, pleasure.

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Cake #2 – The Carrot Cake Issue

In Magazine on April 1, 2011 at 9:52 am

-Reviewed by Afric McGlinchey-

While the title of this tri-annual journal might be ‘cute’, (I reviewed the ‘carrot cake’ issue – which was orange) the contents are definitely impressive. Ingredients include poetry, flash fiction, comment and review.

In spite of an avoidance of prescribed themes, the submissions for this second issue of Cake happened to be ‘surprisingly awash with poems about the sea’ according to editor Martha Sprackland. An illustration by Naomi Smith captures this theme: a couple sits gleefully in bed together while waves crash up on either side of them; shark fins and lifebuoy hinting at interesting underlying themes.

The ordinarily ‘out of place’ is welcome in Cake, as editor Andrew McMillan points out. And in a guest editorial, Luke Kennard specifies examples of ‘out of place’ things he likes: the way John Ashbery juxtaposes contrasting elements, such as Popeye in a Gothic psychodrama; the mixture of tones: one minute ‘high-falutin’, the next, everyday conversational. An example of this type of incongruous juxtaposition is found in a Frank Kuppner poem: ‘it’s just that I don’t like to see too much blood coming out of a cake.’ In many of the poems here, there’s an attraction for things that are oddly askew, strangeness anchored in the everyday.

This then is the essence of Cake. This selection aims to take the top off your head, jolt you with taste sensations you’ve never had.

The issue opens with a poem called ‘The Sunken Diner’, also by Luke Kennard where the surreal blends with reality and by the turn at the end, it’s the surreal that feels more real.

A poem by Cath Nichols, called ‘Fathom’, captures the transition phase of life and death ‘between the hours of two and four.’ Hugh Thomson’s ‘Screening’ is disarming, with gentle, self-deprecating humour and turn at the last line. I was taken by the evocative soundscape of  Geoff Stevens’ Recalling Wave No. 7:  ‘like a rain-soaked raven’s wing flapping/in my face’, and Martin Fraser’s Blue Wind: ‘taste the wind-nipped salt drying on your lips’. He also has some striking images: ‘fish/jumping for their lives straight/into mouths of birds.’ Joe Boswell’s prose poem is untitled – a visceral description of a roomful of people who disgust the speaker, especially the beautiful girl opposite: ‘I want to envelop her mouth in mine; to clamp her jaw in my bite and tear out her teeth.’  A  particularly strong poem by Sue Burge is ‘On accepting Oysters from Strangers’, where a man approaches a woman, ‘absorbing/the reek of spent men, furtive sweat’ and ‘a cat, black as all the sins’ feasts on her discarded oyster shell. In ‘Pennine Nocturne’, Phillip Beverley describes the dark: ‘a canvas no artist has named’ – as ‘the colour of crow.’

‘A love song’ by Noel Williams captivates for all but the last stanza, which might be better left out. Using the refrain ‘Which is why’, it describes a woman loved, but unavailable, who takes ‘a sickle to the lawn in moonlight’. Lovely image. In a chilling poem by Jacob Silkstone, the foreshadowing of doom begins with the ‘first gouts of dawn’ and the ‘dim mortuary light of morning’. The final line of the first stanza spells out the significance of this day: ‘she picked out her Sunday dress to die in.’ These poems beautifully place landscape as backdrop for drama. ‘To a Daughter of Roan Inish’, by Alexandra Lister, is filled with music and melancholy: ‘On Milk Street they pull up black fish,/slap from the grey squall and spill’.

While many of the poems are about sea-things, others are about exotic places and strange fruits, some about death, suicide, rape, divorce. Yet these latter themes don’t sit heavily on the stomach, and this may be due to the fine balancing act of the ordering of poems, which link well together, sometimes threaded by a single word.

Melanie Graham’s provocatively titled ‘Discovering Porn on the Yard Sale Computer’ and ‘Divorcee Reflects on the Divinity of Erectile Dysfunction’ are graphically gruesome; but the endings don’t disappoint. Her third poem, Between Women, uses a powerful image to symbolise a violation:  ‘I sat, mesmerized/by the silver platter of tomatoes,/plumbed innards bare as seeded hearts,/sliced so thinly, arranged so carefully.’

Mark Burns Cassell reviews a collection by Guyana-born Grace Nichols: Picasso I Want my Face Back. Interspersed with criticism about expectation of a ‘thematic progression which never quite comes’, he describes her work as ‘roomy’ and ‘fluid’, with ‘raw energy…’richness of imagery’, tenacity and joy: ‘But most of all, you take us/down rivers down rivers/where our hands sift soft vegetational-waters-/some gleaming dark as sarsaparilla/some brown as rum and just as drunk.’ (Into the Interior). Certainly the review sent me looking for her poetry.

‘The future of poetry begins here’ claim Claire Pollard and James Byrne in their introduction to Voice Recognition, an anthology reviewed by Sarah Hymas. The poems here, Hymas writes, ‘are frequently high energy, self-conscious and stretching for innovation.’ Sometimes she is delighted by the result; in other poems, such as those by Annie Katchinska, the world created is ‘itchy, almost, like eczema, but eczema that covers the skin in beautiful designs.’  Many poets admirably resist the urge (‘displayed elsewhere’) to ‘pile wilfully eclectic imagery upon itself, so smothering melody and clarity.’ While she admits this selection does offer something for ‘almost everyone’, she is not entirely convinced herself and wonders how many of these poets will still be visible after a decade. ‘If this is a manifesto…then I’d hope the less rushed the poet is, the more ground they’ll cover.’ An articulate, thought-provoking review.

The standard of reviews, however, is somewhat uneven, and strangely, typos begin to creep in towards the end. What is also frustrating is that contributor notes are missing for over half of the contributors.

But three particularly outstanding poems, Dymond’s ‘White-tailed Eagle’, ‘Spearhafoc’ by Steve Ely, and ‘Moth’ by Andrew Wynn Owen, provide a satisfying conclusion to this anthology, redeeming my original impression of overall excellence.

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Horizon Review #5

In Magazine, online magazine on March 13, 2011 at 5:04 pm

-Reviewed by Juliet Wilson-

Horizon Review is an online journal produced by Salt Publishing, which takes its name and its inspiration from Horizon, the magazine Cyril Connolly ran from the outbreak of the War in 1939 until it closed in 1949. Horizon Review is currently edited by Katy Evans-Bush who says she wants Horizon review to be

‘an experience, a message, a feast like a meal where all food groups are represented and the amino acids and vitamins all complement one another’.

So, is that what Horizon Review really feels like? From the contents list, the reader can see that here are poetry, short stories, essays, reviews, an interview and a couple of cartoons. So in that sense, the journal certainly fulfils Evans-Bush’s vision.

Most of the short stories are quietly insightful dissections of every-day life and relationships. Steven Maxwell’s ‘The Festival’ outlines the way a father and son relationship changes when the two go to Glastonbury together.  Maire T Robinson’s ‘Even the Sea Dreams of Escape’ is a story of how Sophie – stuck in a boring job in a small town – finds transformation.

The poetry ranges from quiet understatement to experimentation, with impressive use of rhyme by almost all the poets included. I loved Maryann Corbett’s poems ‘Portent’ and ‘Holiday Concert’. The former is a struggle to understand a dream about a ballet and ends, as the ballerina is lifted and carried away with the line ‘How do I know this isn’t victory?’; the latter is a description of a concert, full of precise detail and the seventh grade boy who in the future

‘will wince at the thought
of singing, yet will ache to sing, in silence,
silence even to the generation to come’

Both these poems convey the intrinsic oddness in the ordinary social event that is going to a performance.

Matt Merrit’s ‘Zugunruhe’ is a quiet poem that steals up on the reader; it’s a haunting evocation of the unsettling feeling evinced by migrating birds. (‘Zugunruhe’ is a German compound word made up of the elements ‘Zug’ – move and ‘Unruhe’ – restlessness that is used to describe the restlessness of migratory species).

Another poem that spoke to me was ‘In the Garden’, Sophie Nicholl’s poignant imagining of poems that had been buried by a poet fleeing the authorities later becoming part of the orange trees that were planted in the same ground. A beautiful symbol of transformation and hope. I also enjoyed David Troupe’s minimalistic and atmospheric ‘Bob and Jackie Watch Heat Lightning From Their Porch’.

Robert Archabeau’s intelligent and readable essay on Nick Cave was also particularly gratifying. This starts by drawing parallels between Archabeau’s own childhood in provincial Canada and Cave’s youth in small town Australia. There is an exploration of the Romantic poets concludings that they felt ill at ease in the modern world and that this feeling (combined with society in turn not supporting poets, no generous patrons for the Romantics as there had been for earlier poets!) gave them a great amount of artistic freedom. A detailed critique of Cave’s song There She Goes My Beautiful World analyses how his writing aligns with the Romantic movement. Not only was this essay interesting and fascinating, it also got me to pick up the Nick Cave CD which I have neglected for far too long.

Horizon Review certainly offers a wide range of different types of writing and the pieces complement each other well.

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Nutshell #2

In Magazine on February 16, 2011 at 6:46 pm

-Reviewed by Joan Standwick-

The closure of Pen Pusher Magazine has come as a shock to me, and countless others. I have been carrying its back issues for a while now, pondering on the necessity of reviewing them – surely they are doing well enough on their own? Pen Pusher was that rare thing: beautiful, critically approved, whilst remaining accessible. Yet, their closure shows us that no literary magazine is safe, and it is more urgent than ever to support them.

It is in the spirit that I bring to you Nutshell #2. Nutshell is a perfectly packaged literary magazine, aware that it is part of a rare club. It states in its inside page: ‘Every issue is an achievement and the proof that literary magazines have an audience, and a loving one’.

A mixture of poetry, short stories and illustration, Nutshell’s style can be summarized as eclectic, impressive yet irreverent. The writing has a twisted sense of humour, whether it’s in the film-pastiche ‘Oyster Brats’ by Nikesh Shukla, the deadpan delivery of Paul McGrane’s poems, or the desperate madness of an Adam J Maynard. Nutshell is also capable of wild, raw, poetry, that holds a sensory knife to your throat, as is the case with Alexandra Lister in ‘To a Daughter of Roan Inish’:

‘Shelling crabs, you stand in your white

work dress – lovebirds in drawn thread pull

against your chest, the trails of burnt morning honey

set on thewarp and weft’

Refreshingly, Nutshell allows an average of two poems per person and a significant percentage of these, as well as the stories are given tailor-made illustrations. The informed and entertaining interviews of Don Paterson and Simonetta Agnello Hornby are one of the many highlights of this magazine’s issue.

Let us hope Nutshell is sticking around for a while longer, but don’t make the mistake of thinking it’ll survive without you. It won’t. So go and buy it now, it’s only £3.50 and worth every penny.

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Envoi #157 October 2010

In Magazine on January 19, 2011 at 5:18 pm

-Reviewed by Juliet Wilson-

 

Envoi is a UK based poetry journal that has been going since 1957, under various editors, currently Jan Fortune-Wood. One of the aspects of Envoi that I particularly like is that it actually showcases poets. This issue features seven poems from Abegail Morley (shortlisted last year for best first collection in the Forward Prize) and five poems from guest poet Char March. Every other poet included is represented with at least two poems or a lengthy sequence, as opposed to the many poetry journals that often feature only single poems from individual poets. Envoi also includes a number of clearly written, in-depth reviews of poetry collections and the winners of the latest Envoi competition along with the adjudicator’s report. I always find adjudicator’s reports fascinating and insightful, though I rarely agree with the conclusions! Recently entries to the competition have declined so it will in future only be an annual event rather than the quarterly event it has been so far.

 

In this issue, there is a good selection of poems dealing with nature and set in rural areas, some of which deal with environmental issues. Among Char March’s varied poems is ‘ ‘There will only be a loss of 352’ which details the loss of oak trees during the widening of a road widening scheme in Ardnamurchan in 2008.  Martyn Halsall’s ‘Hut of the Shadows’ is also set in the Scottish Highlands and beautifully evokes the atmosphere and mystery of the unknown history of the hut in the title – ‘its legends peat smoke listing in ancient air’. Also set in a similar setting (though there is a Dun Beg in Ireland as well as one in Scotland so I don’t want to assume too much!) Peter Johnson’s sparely written poem ‘Dun Beg’ ends with the vivid lines:

 

‘The gale that burgles our breath transports

the black raven across the white sky.’

 

The same poet gives us a landscape of sheep in the aptly titled ‘Sheep’ and an exploration of the nature of the universe and the dark side in ‘Dark Matters’, hence demonstrating how Envoi’s policy of publishing a number of poems by each poet can give the reader a better feel for the poet’s range.

 

Richard Williams has two poems here. ‘21st Century Fairy Tales’ takes as its starting point the fact that the 2009 Wildlife Photographer of the Year winner was stripped of his award when it was found he had used a tame wolf in his photo. From there he muses on how we embellish our memories in the same way as a photographer uses online editing tools. His other poem is ‘Schrodinger’s Cat’ is a meditation on the uncertainty principle and the apparent meaninglessness of much of life ‘as icebergs are calving in the Barents Sea’. This is a poem I keep re-reading, it is haunting in its effect.

 

I also liked Bob Beagrie’s thoughts in The Star pub in ‘Ronin’ as:

 

‘I sip the stout and sigh, think of a picture

Of the Horse Headed Nebulae in my daughter’s

Encyclopaedia of the Universe, rearing up

With a mane of hydrogen clouds, 1.5 thousand

Light years away; let it bloom in my mind like sakura,

Watch it canter, kick up a spray of frozen satellites’

 

(sakura is the Japanese cherry blossom, perhaps a note here would have been helpful for some readers?).

 

The poetry in this issue of Envoi is varied in content and style, with a lot of very good poems from a varied selection of mostly UK based poets. Well worth a read!

 

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Speed Dating Two Literary Magazines: A Cappella Zoo #5 & Willow Springs #66

In Magazine, online magazine on January 3, 2011 at 1:43 pm

-Reviewed by Claire Trevien-

You might remember the Sabotage review ‘Speed Dating Four Poetry Pamphlets’ – it’s now time to give two poetry and fiction magazines the same treatment! As before, I will be superficially judging the ‘candidates’ on their value for money and give you a quick trip inside their brain.

Who?

So in other words: a veteran versus a newbie. Willow Springs is a bi-yearly print journal that has been going since 1977. A Cappella Zoo is a bi-yearly web and print journal since autumn 2008.

In its 30+ years, Willow Springs has published some impressive names, such as Jorge Luis Borges, WS Merwin, Charles Bukowski, and Sabotage favourite, Mark Halliday.

As a newer arrival, A Cappella Zoo concentrates on magic realism and slipstream styles of writing ‘from around the world’.  It prints its issues first then gradually releases the material online.

Both magazines are based in the United States.

How Much?

A Cappella Zoo #5 boasts 15 stories, 14 poems, 2 artists and 5 countries for $4

Willow Springs #66 boasts 18 poems, 3 fiction stories, 1 non-fiction story and an interview for $10

What?

First: I must mention a subject that recurred in both magazines often enough that it bears mentioning: birds. Birds of all types, sometimes metaphorical, were a key theme; maybe avian flu was to blame? I don’t mind winged creatures but after one too many mention of flying the nest I was harking after a good canine tale.

In light of (fairly) recent complaints that not enough women are published in literary magazines I was also heartened to find this was quite the reverse in these US publications, with a majority of female writers in Willow Springs #66 and an equal split in A Cappella Zoo #5.

Willow Springs #66 Highlights:

Katie Cortese ‘International Cooking for Beginners’ gets first prize: a captivating yet frustrating tale of stigmatization, prejudices and fantasies. It is frustrating because of the non-dits that it peppers throughout the tale like brief peeks through venetian blinds. What Cortese is best at is sketching small-minded individuals encountering alien experiences, but without reducing them to buffoons.

Finding a stand-out for the poetry was a harder task as I was drawn to several poems, all very different from each other with their own defects and qualities. It seems fair to call out Kathleen Flenniken’s ‘A Great Physicist Recalls the Manhattan Project’. The poem deals with John A. Wheeler’s life, a man I know nothing about save what the poem tells me, which is quite sufficient. It is both personal and impersonal, blending tender observations with scientific matter of factness:

‘I watched my youngest climb as the sun blazed behind her golden hair

and realized that halos were not a painter’s invention

but a consequence of nature. Have you ever held plutonium in your hand?’

Another stand-out is Albert Garcia’s poem ‘Dig’. Narrated by a ten year old boy who happens on the grave of an Indian child, this moment of reckoning escapes the pitfalls of twee with its sober descriptions. The ending in particular, of the father shoveling earth back on the bones, ‘the sounds / of a straining body, of breathing’, is masterful.

There are no bad pieces as such in this magazine’s issue, but nor is there really any genius. Even the stand-outs that I’ve mentioned lack that certain oomph, that certain kick that makes you tingle all over. Willow Springs #66 plays it too safe for my liking, but at the same time, it’s satisfying to read works knowing you won’t cut yourself.

A Cappella Zoo #5:

Amongst the short stories ‘Birds Every Child Should Know’ by Kate Riedel stands out. It doesn’t suffer, like many other works in this magazine do, of the clipped-sentence syndrome, a tiresome technique used in an effort to heighten mystery. It is attempted by many but only mastered by a few. This story manages the right balance of information and wonder, and twists your heart in a knot in the process.

A poetry highlight is Lisa Grove’s ‘The Cat and the Fiddle’. Sensuous, deliciously crafted, it manages to pull together in a few lines a heavy mix of images: sex, dishwashing, car crashes, eating, a meditation on the future, under the arc of hey diddle diddle, without feeling contrived:

‘Our blood may ooze

over the plate of pavement like syrup spilling down

pancakes, without the time to even regret not licking

the sweet maple of our skin’

Other stand-outs are Anna Jaquiery’s ‘Fragmentation’, a mosaic of a poem that tries to pin the unpinnable, and Nancy Gold’s ‘Showtime’, a tale of freakshows, with a character worthy of a Victor Hugo novel, and a touch of Icarus.

A Cappella Zoo’s authors do not lack imagination, but it is the execution that lets several pieces down: underworked, under-thought, buried under too many contrivances to let their worth shine through. The poetry in particular suffers, struggling to manage that magic blend of clarity, ambiguity and storytelling it aims for.

In Conclusion

I wasn’t bowled over by either magazine, though both had their highlights. Willow Springs #66, the good looking elderly gentleman, seduced me first with its old school ways and reliably good poems. The cover and paper are of a superior quality too. However, A Cappella Zoo #5, like an eccentric sailor, has been craftily winning me over with its rich tales. The quality is more variable in A Cappella Zoo #5 but the imagination on display is intriguing enough to make the stories and poems that do work, shine brighter.

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