Reviews of the Ephemeral

Posts Tagged ‘Caroline Crew’

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Published Poetry 2012: a Top 10

In End of year round-up on December 10, 2012 at 12:14 am

-Listed by Claire Trévien-

June

As the end of the year approaches, it is customary to attempt round-ups of sorts. Last year, I asked for people’s favourite poetry pamphlets on twitter. This year I will be taking inspiration from last year’s fiction top ten and providing links to the top ten most read published poetry reviews (from this year). If you are looking for gift inspirations or wanting to stumble on something new, you could do worse than take a look at this list.

They are:

1. Four 2011 Poetry Business Prizewinners (Smiths/Doorstop 2012). Reviewed by Sophie Mayer.

2. Catechism: Poems for Pussy Riot. Reviewed by Harry Giles.

3. Human Shade by Robert Peake (Lost Horse Press). Reviewed by Martha Sprackland.

4. lapping water by Dan Flore III. Reviewed by Ian Chung.

5. ILK #1. Reviewed by John McGhee.

6. Fleck and the Bank by Rob A. Mackenzie (Salt Publishing). Reviewed by Harry Giles.

7. All the Rooms of Uncle’s Head by Tony Williams (Nine Arches Press). Reviewed by Charles Whalley.

8. Antiphon #1. Reviewed by John McGhee.

9. Poland at the Door by Evelyn Posamentier (Knives, Forks and Spoons Press). Reviewed by Ian Chung.

10. Four Rack Press pamphlets. Reviewed by Angela Topping.

Originally published in 2011, Charles Whalley’s review of Megan Fernandes’ Organ Speech (Corrupt Press) would have otherwise appeared third.

There’s a pleasing presence of webzines and self-published work on this list. Group or anthology reviews also appear to have been popular, though I suspect that the popularity of the Smith/Doorstop and Catechism reviews is in part due to their controversial natures – but if so, where is Eireann Lorsung’s thought-provoking meditation on poetic tourism in Colette Sensier’s début pamphlet How Many Camels is too Many?

So far the least viewed review of a poetry publication is Diidxadó by Víctor Terán (Poetry Translation Centre), which seems a shame considering its reviewer, Judi Sutherland, describes it as ‘Pablo Neruda in a bitter mood’, what’s not to love?

If I were to construct my own personal 2012 list free of the constraints of what has been reviewed in Sabotage, and comprising magazines, anthologies, and pamphlets, I should no doubt curse my poor short-term memory. Such a list would undoubtedly include however: Cat Conway’s Static Cling (Dancing Girl Press, being reviewed soon for Sabotage), Agenda vol. 46 no. 4, Azita Ghahreman’s Poems (Poetry Translation Centre), Kayo Chingonyi’s Some Bright Elegance (Salt Publishing), and Adelle Stripe’s Dark Corners of the Land (Blackheath Books). A couple more impose themselves, but would be ineligible since I have poems in them: Adventures in Form (Penned in the Margins), Fuselit: Contraption, and Poems in Which. What would be on your list? Please do share in the comments.

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ILK #1

In Blogzines, online magazine, Website on February 6, 2012 at 10:00 am

-Reviewed by John McGhee -

The Canadian experimental poet Christian Bök, in his ‘fantasy about the badass-ness of poetry’ The Extremophile, likens poetry to an indestructible bacterium: ‘It feeds on asbestos… It grows in lagoons of boiling asphalt…  It can withstand temperatures of 323 degrees Kelvin, hot enough to melt rubidium… It is invincible.  It is unkillable.’

I’m with Bök.  Let’s have poetry that is indestructible, brilliant, and bold.

The excellent launch issue of ILK, an online journal edited by Caroline Crew and Chris Emslie, has just the right kind of boldness.  In its best moments, there is inventive imagery and language and structural playfulness.  The tone is one of convivial brashness.  In the main, the poems are punchy, and the poets’ concerns are urgent, personal and contemporary.

Much of what is lively and mysterious in ILK is generated using relaxed, unadorned language.  Amy Herschleb provides the disgustingly memorable ‘birds hidden in the grass like meat Easter Eggs’ (‘The Title of This Poem is Secret’).  In ‘Ukulele’, Rob Macdonald turns a minor mental leap into a mellow reflection on childish innocence.  Read this and you’ll want to believe again that ‘the world is sugarcane and good and goes on forever in every direction.’

There is variety in approach and structure.  One poem is a recipe: Deirdre Knowles’ ‘Rabbit’, where the reader is commanded to ‘unsheath your finest knife / and cut your best hand in two’ and ‘re-entrail a pheasant’.  Knowles also has a story told algebraically, ‘Total’: ‘I am a B not an A nor a C. / You are a D and wish you were an S.’  Canadian Amanda Earl pours us two flavours of ghazal (‘Anti-Ghazal’ and ‘Bastard Ghazal’).  Both are furtive and inebriating.  David Raymond’s ‘Poetry Assemblies and Theories Var*’ is a story as a numbered list, elaborated using footnotes containing offbeat definitions.  The longest piece is from Mathias Svalina and Julia Cohen, the unsettling extended prose poem, ‘Two Sisters’.  In fact, prose fragments are favoured and variations involving rhyme are not represented at all.  Maybe I missed it but I couldn’t find a single rhyme, unless I count Dearman McKay rhyming ‘tongue’ with ‘tongue’ in the eerie ‘Lingua/Zunge‘.

The choice of subject matter and how it is described also shows a boldness but one that does not descend into gratuitous nastiness or shock for its own sake.  Michael Koh’s intriguing ‘I Take Pictures’ paints a grisly war scene in short fragments, a staccato massacre.  The cheerless narrator of Molly Prentiss’s ‘I Can Be Found Right Here’ appears ‘squatting over a toilet seat and peeing on my leg’ and opines ‘fuck everyone… fuck super hero shows.  fuck cutting and pasting my life into 140 characters.’  On a lighter note—but one just as splendidly vulgar—Deirdre Knowles clears up the vexed question of whether a penis or a vagina makes a better musical instrument.  It’s the penis, apparently.

At ILK, the day is today and the time is now.  It is poetry being devised on laptops and read aloud from smartphones.  Celebrities, computer games and websites are name-checked.  A plea: just once, wouldn’t it be great to read a poetic reference to a website other than Wikipedia, Twitter, Craigslist or Google? What about a poem about B3ta or Pathetic Motorways, just for a change?

With Netflix launching this month in the UK, surely it is timely for me to recommend Madison Langston’s ‘Asking Someone What To Watch On Netflix Is A Form Of Flirting‘, which concludes with the glitzy ‘I have never masturbated / to the Wikipedia entry for Carmen Electra / but I have masturbated / to the idea of it.’  Favourite title of the issue goes to either M.G. Martin and his nervy tale ‘The Band is Playing CTRL + ALT + DELETE, Again’ or Wendy Xu’s account of morning ennui, ‘The Future Doesn’t Care About Your Breakfast‘.

ILK’s website design is snappy and functional (although for Luddites like me, a PDF option or other print- ready version would be great).  I see US and Canadian poets are well-represented in the debut ILK and, casting forward to future issues, I am interested to see how the geographic mix of contributors develops.  I’m sure there are plenty of UK poets who will be able to match the boldness of those appearing this time.  Why can’t poetry be badass?  Subtlety is overrated.  As Bök’s Extremophile suggests, poetry ‘breathes iron… needs no oxygen to live… It awaits your experiments.’

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Mudluscious #16

In online magazine on July 12, 2011 at 9:46 am

-Reviewed by Caroline Crew-

Content over style.

Exactly how worn out is the idiom style over substance? Probably entirely. However it is a balance we have to work with and online literary magazines really seem to bring out this tension. None more so than Mud Luscious Press’ quarterly offering, Mudluscious. While MLP’s site is all colourful minimalism and swagger, the magazine is the bleakest of designs. No colour, no illustrations, and available only as a PDF download—a fact that really seems at odds with the potential that digital platforms offer literary magazines. Especially perplexing is this resistance to really embrace the opportunities of the online existence when Mudluscious is embracing some truly challenging writing.

We open with the marvellous Parker Tettleton’s short prose-poem ‘What I Want & How I Live’, the meta-narrative of which seems to set the stage for what follows. Something I’ve noticed with Tettleton’s prose-poetry it the extent to which he really achieves the blurring of lines that a true achievement in this genre requires.  In this piece the expanse covered—from the actuality of the writer at the page to the universality of the male and female ‘thrust and ache’ as Louise Glück describes it- melds together the exactness expected of prose with the metaphoric leaps granted to poetry.

This genre crossing that is one of basic hallmarks of contemporary writing that rejects the mainstream. I hesitate at the descriptor ‘experimental’, as more often than not this is just shorthand for the myriad of more alternative approaches to creative writing. However, ‘experiment’ seems the most apt way to describe Jonas Williams’ intriguing piece ‘Ranch-Ready Crop-Tops’. There is an inherent tension in this fiction between the two sections ‘Vocabulary’ and ‘Applied Vocabulary’ that is in tune with the consumerist tension of our capitalist society—the product set against yet within the human, mass-production against organic. By absorbing as well as creating a jargon of industrial food production Williams does a great job of pulling the reader to the centre of the piece with a compelling verfremdungseffekt, making the familiar landscape of a grocery store entirely alien.

However, do not flee from Mudluscious if you think ‘experimental’ writing is not your thing. There is true lyricism to behold here. Molly Prentiss’ ‘How the West Was Lost’ is drenched in sensual landscape and disarmingly poignant advice:

 

And triangles are the strongest shape, but not emotionally. Here:

you must have an odd number of tattoos but an even number of lovers.

 

There are many, many other highlights—remarkable for such a small collection, that to discuss them all here would steal the joy of discovery.  It is a delight to read a magazine that not only has no filler, but that is also aware of its consumption as a whole. The care and attention with which such a collection has been put together and arranged is marred only by the decision to shove the pieces together. The writing explodes in the mind but has no room on the page; instead the works muscle in on each other. Still, this stylistic limitation cannot truly impact the explosive content.

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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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Saboteur Awards – The Results

In Saboteur Awards on June 16, 2011 at 5:40 pm

Saboteur Awards

The Saboteur Awards are a new award celebrating literary magazines. Over the last few weeks, a team of volunteer judges have been poring over the shortlist, posting to each other copies of the print magazines, getting angry at the mail and dealing with technical hitches. Whilst the top three became clear early in the discussion process, judges were impressed with many of the other shortlisted magazines. Positives could be found even in the magazines that were described as ‘not being my cup of tea’ (can you tell that the majority of judges were British?) In light of this, we would be happy to provide any of the magazines shortlisted with feedback, should they be interested in the particulars (get in touch at editor@sabotagereviews.com).

The magazines that most impressed us were those that had a unity of purpose, in other words a strong, cohesive editorial vision. Their design matched and enhanced their content. We feel that our top three deserve recognition for the contributions they’ve made to the literary world. They are exciting, innovative, fresh, and stretched the boundaries of what we thought literary magazines could achieve.

1st Place: Polarity

Judges were impressed by Polarity’s ambition and praised the range of formal innovations within its pages. They commended its strong editorial and aesthetic vision and deemed the magazine as ‘not just displaying art, but being a piece of art itself, without the form taking away from the content’. The theme of ‘Tax vs Death’ was deemed broad enough to allow inspired approaches, whilst still being a cohesive and echoing thread. The integration of the visual with the textual was seen as a particular success. Finally, as one judge said: ‘Who would have thought that surrealism could feel so…welcoming? […]  I could pay no higher compliment to the magazine than to say it has fostered in me a newfound appreciation for surrealism in art/literature.’

2nd Place: >kill author

Judges were all agreed that this was an outstanding magazine that successfully made use of the internet. Whilst conceptual and experimental, the content was still deemed accessible. Judges admired the integration of poetry with prose (and resulting cross pollinations). The slick, minimalist website received high praise; one judge said it was ‘like Jil Sander in website form’. As one judge said: ‘It was one of those things that made me glad that I’m alive now – in the times of the internet, anonymity and internationalist art. It really grasps the spirit of our time for me.’

3rd Place: La Petite Zine

La Petite Zine was deemed a touchstone for experimental poetry in bite-size forms. The content was found to be of high quality with one judge commenting on the ‘brilliant variety of truly potent poems’. The website was admired for being minimalist, clean, functional, yet iconic. In particular, judges appreciated the taglines that led into each poem. La Petite Zine, again, has clearly embraced the internet as a medium, and its multi-platform presence was praised.

Highly Commended for its use of web-integration: Moon Milk Review

A running interest during discussions was whether the magazines fully made use of their chosen medium’s potential. In particular we paid attention to online magazines that attempted to go beyond what a print magazine could achieve. For instance, judges appreciated the integration of recordings/video in Stone Telling (as well as in Goblin Fruit) as an example of added value and accessibility.

However, the magazine that most impressed us in terms of web integration was Moon Milk Review. The magazine was praised for its abundant use of links, giving the impression that it was a fruitful launching pad. As one judge said:

‘that’s what beautiful (and dangerous) about the web – everything links up together and there’s a vast sea of information out there. Most other zines we’ve looked at feel much more insular by comparison, [...]linking to other places is something you can’t do in print and as such is very much an advantage of the online form. Moon Milk Review gives us an article you can dig around if you like, or can skim over if you don’t like it.’

The use of YouTube was also appreciated, whilst the Prosetry section was praised for taking advantage of the online platform and reinventing communication between the visual and the textual.

The judges were Anna Bogdanova, Ian Chung, Caroline Crew, Claire Trévien and Richard T. Watson

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Literary Blogs

In Blogzines on March 5, 2011 at 10:52 pm

At a recent Identity Parade event at Paris’ Shakespeare & Co, the four invited readers, A.B. Jackson, Annie Freud, Sally Read,  Ahren Warner, as well as editor Roddy Lumsden were all asked about their opinion on blogging. I was surprised to hear that none of them were particularly active on the internet, preferring the spoken word. Annie Freud said she had great admiration for those who do it with ‘application’ but couldn’t stand word ‘vomiting’.

In that spirit, I would like to share a few blogs who do ‘do it’ with application. Having said that, in compiling this list, I found myself rather torn as several of these blogs are also, to varying degrees, magazines (or blogzines if you will). Blogzines are those fluid entities that give us the same material as a literary magazine would (without the unity of purpose of singular issues)  peppered with more personal subject matter. Their effect is very different from, say, thumbing a copy of Poetry Review, or even a specific internet magazine like Diagram, but I am not implying that in a negative sense. The atmosphere is different, less stilted, more inviting, you can dip into them on Tuesday, check back a week later and find new exciting things to take your fancy. These blog-zines manage that seductive blend of uniting quality with accessibility and candidness. They are forces to be reckoned with.

(in alphabetical order)

Baroque in Hackney

Katy Evans-Bush’s blog is an incontournable feature of the blogosphere. Here you will find, jostling comfortably together, politics and poetry, presented in a wry, informed and entertaining manner. Katy is not afraid to dive into incendiary subjects head on and emerge victorious, she might almost convince me to use an Oxford Comma.

Cut Out & Keep

The blog of the excellent magazine Fuselit edited by Kirsten Irving and Jon Stone. Much more than a promotional tool for the magazine, the blog wittily reviews and promotes other presses and authors, provides insights into the Fuselit machine, and, much like the rest of the website, makes you hope they achieve everything they set out to do.

Eyewear

Todd Swift’s personal blog, also happens to be a rather impressive magazine (so impressive that the British Library are archiving it for posterity). It combines insightful reviews of poetry, features poets and also discusses politics and pop culture. Also, on a shallow note, I love the different images used for the header.

Flotsam

There is something eminently refreshing about Caroline Crew’s blog, whether it’s feeling the same excitement when discovering the new poet she decides to share or eagerly nodding as she summarizes a current trend in the poetic world. She is also a fine reviewer, y’a know.

Hand + Star

Although I enjoy the ‘New Writing’ section of this webzine, I have to confess to preferring its blog even more for reviewing live literary events which is something not done enough, IMHO.

Peony Moon

Michelle McGrane’s blog of contemporary poetry puts most blogs to shame for the regularity of its qualitative output. Here you will find reviews, find out about events and discover new poets in the process.

Raw Light

Jane Holland’s blog is not just a recording of her trials and tribulations as a writer (though there is some of that), she also posts plenty of sound advice for writers. Both are written with this sort of gusty bravado that make you want to roar, if you want to taste some of that medicine, you could do worse than start here.

—-

This list is far from exhaustive (and doesn’t pretend to be) these are just a few of my favourite blog(zine)s. You are very welcome to add your own favourites in the comment.

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End of Year Round-Up: The Reviewers

In End of year round-up on December 18, 2010 at 11:45 am

2010 was the year Sabotage went from being just a thought to a fully-fledged website. To celebrate not just the wonderful reviewers who are the backbone of this site, but also the literature that has made our year what it is, I have asked several reviewers to answer these three short questions:

-Has 2010 brought to your attention any outstanding literary magazines (be they online or in print), if so, which?

-What event sticks out in your mind as the literary event of 2010 (it can be a personal accomplishment)?

-What was your favourite literary discovery of the year (it can be a single poem, a novel, a pamphlet, a press, …)?

Below you will find the answers of several of this year’s reviewers, and in a few days I will publish the answers of several authors, both of poetry and fiction, who were kind enough to take part.

To make things fair, here are my brief answers, then I’ll hand it over to the reviewers:

-Obviously the creation of Sabotage has brought my attention to several excellent magazines. My favourite discovery is probably Diagram. I reviewed its Summer 2010 issue for The Review Review. It was a bit of a surprise favourite as I tend to prefer poetry to short stories. This is what I said about it in the review: ‘The fiction featured displays an obsessive relationship to dissection and decorticates genres, voices, people. Sometimes this mad-scientist effervescence overwhelms the content to the point of un-readability, but more often than not, it elates. Diagram is a welcome shock-therapy to more traditional online journals – a breath of unruly air displacing paperwork.’

-There are several events that I could cite, 2010 brought the death of two personal heavyweight: Edwin Morgan and J.D. Salinger. Though with the latter, I could not help but feel a certain morbid curiosity for the work he kept hidden, as if he were the guardian of a treasure and finally defeated by a cocky young hero who knew the answers to the riddle. On a personal level, it was getting two poems accepted by Poetry Salzburg Review, a magazine I have long admired for the consistent quality of its output, and its vibrantly multi-cultural authors.

-Now that’s definitely a tough one. I discovered James Merrill’s ‘Charles on Fire’ and Charles Causley’s ‘Convoy’ thanks to Katy Evans-Bush’s workshop Making Poetry at the Poetry School, both have stuck with me for days beyond reading. Amongst pamphlets, my favourites were Mark Halliday’s No panic here, Jon Stone’s Scarecrows and Joe Dunthorne’s Faber New Poets pamphlet. As far as collections go two stand out: Natasha Trethewey’s Native Guard and Karen Annesen’s How to Fall.

The Reviewers (in no particular order):

Richard T. Watson is a writer and director who has reviewed several works for Sabotage, most recently two of Sidekick Books’ publications, Pocket Spellbook and Coin Opera. You can find his review here, and his blog here.

-Its focal hero might make it seem a tad outdated, but I’ve enjoyed the Ben Jonson Journal (which I discovered in 2010, but has been running for much longer). It’s one of the many things I came across as a student that I wanted to get into in more depth, but never had time because of the looming deadline thing. But what I did read of the BJJ helped with my Dissertation, and all of it was fascinating.

-It’s not that long since National Poetry Week, which included a BBC adaptation of Chris Reid’s poem The Song of Lunch on BBC Two – which I think is probably my literary event of the year (and not just for the connection to my own University). The poem was translated more or less directly to the screen without addition or abridgement, a rare case of bringing poetry to mainstream popular culture. Having Alan Rickman and Emma Thompson involved helps as well.

-My favourite literary discovery of 2010 is Julia Bird’s poem ‘For my Brother, Relentlessly’, which is published in Coin Opera, a micro-anthology from Sidekick Books. It’s a poem in nostalgic praise of  arcade game classic Space Invaders, laid out like the screen of a Space Invaders game. The text itself is simply the repeated question ‘Can I have a go on the Space Invaders now?’ – but what I especially like is the way that the title’s comma conjures an image of a small girl asking this of her brother without pausing for breath for several minutes. Then, when she does finally take a breath, she says ‘please’.

Juliet Wilson is a poet who has written a series of reviews on environmental literary magazines for Sabotage, her most recent review can be found here whilst her website is here.

-2010 was the year I really became aware of Anon Poetry magazine. I knew it existed and had read an old copy but this year they accepted two of my poems and I found myself at the wonderful launch party at the Scottish Poetry Library and bought more back copies. The current editor Colin Fraser really knows how to choose good poetry (not just because he chooses mine!) and there are also a selection of intelligent and thought provoking articles about poetry in the magazine. Add to this that its a lovely neat format and fits quite easily into a handbag or pocket for reading on the bus, definitely a great read. The anon website is here and they’re on Twitter too:

-The event that for me was the literary event of 2010 was (sorry to blow my own trumpet!) the launch of my poetry chapbook Unthinkable Skies by Calder Wood Press.

-My favourite literary discovery was Lorsque j’etais un oeuvre d’art by Eric Emanuel Schmitt, an amazing, weird and wonderful novel about a man who is saved from committing suicide by an art entrepreneur who offers him the chance to become a living piece of art. A thought provoking exploration of what it means to be human written with the narrative drive of a thriller. I don’t know whether it’s been translated into English. I always find that reading an exceptionally good book in a foreign language intensifies the experience for me, as I meed to concentrate more and there’s a real sense of achievement in the reading!

Ian Chung is a poet who blogs here and tweets here. His most recent review for Sabotage is of the arts-collective website Lazy Gramophone.

-Polarity Magazine comes to mind. I came to it quite by chance, as the chief editor happens to teach on my university course as well and there was a launch event held at the university. It’s a print magazine, very professionally done, with each issue being ‘organised around two falsely polarised concepts’. The magazine’s website has some excerpts from the first issue.
-I’m going to go with a personal accomplishment here, and that was getting a couple of my poems accepted by The Cadaverine. It was my third time submitting, so I guess it’s true, third time’s the charm! Seriously though, it was an honour for my work to be chosen, and I’m looking forward to seeing it appear on the newly revamped website.

-I’m going to say it was Tom McCarthy’s Remainder. In a seminar last year, I’d read the Zadie Smith essay, ‘Two Paths for the Novel’, in which she reviews Remainder and Joseph O’Neill’sNetherland, and was intrigued by how she saw them as representing opposing futures for the Anglophone novel. I’d meant to read Remainder since then, but only got around to doing so over the summer holidays. It’s definitely an interesting read, in the way that its protagonist escalates the cycles of repetition that are the only means by which his life can anchor itself meaningfully. Smith notes at the start of her essay that Remainder took seven years to find a publisher, which isn’t surprising, given how its structure deliberately defies the sort of marketable narrative that would sit nicely in a chain bookstore’s window display.

Caroline Crew is a poet and a prolific blogger of all things poetic here.  She reviewed Blue-eyed boy bait for Sabotage here.

-For me the publications that have really sung that this year have all had a really strong sense of identity and of purpose. Literary magazines and projects that eshcew the normal manifestos on the submissions page. The ones that have really struck me this year have been Fuselit– a gorgeous magazine that runs of a spur word. Popshot, the illustrated poetry magazine that brings together the visual and the verbal to stunning effect, and my current favourite, > kill author, an online magazine that helped me rid myself of the silly preconception that print is inherently better.

-Sadly, for me that would have to be the passing of Edwin Morgan, at the grand age of 90. He was the first Scots Makar, and when it comes down to it, just a absolutely stellar poet. The death of such an imagination leaves an abyss.
-Well, moving across the Atlantic has been strange for me in many ways, but the epic differences in the poetry being written was definitely the most astounding. My favourite discovery so far would have to be Ada Limon. I saw her read recently and bought her excellent collection, sharks in the rivers, and cannot let it be out of my reach.

Jared Randall is a poet who blogs here, his first book of poetry, Aprocryphal Road Code, is now available from Salt Publishing. He reviewed >kill author for Sabotage here.

-The Offending Adam is probably the most intriguing online lit mag to catch my eye this year. TOA has taken the online lit mag format and run with it. Editors Andrew Wessels and Co. present weekly features that you can read in a relatively few spare moments because they focus on (usually) a single poet’s work. This focused brevity includes a brief statement from the author or a third party about what they think of the work and how it has come into existence. What is more, TOA takes care to ensure this glimpse behind the scenes/recommendation lends a sense of literary justification and thoughtfulness without descending into either facile interpretism or the chance to merely sound off on one’s poetic opinions.

Rather than browsing for a mag’s hidden gems among a multitude of works that may serve as mere fodder, every entry of TOA leaves me excited for next week’s installment. TOA’s eye for quality and the breathing space they leave to really consider the work at hand fly in the face of the common “dime-a-dozen” argument against online literature journals. You can sign up for weekly updates via email or Facebook and always know that your next poetry fix is in the wings and that you won’t have to wade through scads of authors to get to something you’ll truly want to consider.

-I don’t know that I’m qualified to give a grand literary pronouncement of what event was most important on a grand scale, but I did experience a very personal circle of memorable events at the end of 2010. The circle involves the publication of my own first book of poetry (Apocryphal Road Code) but really centers on the National Book Award in fiction as won by my former Western Michigan University undergrad professor, Jaimy Gordon.

The background of this story goes back a decade. Jaimy’s was my final fiction workshop before I dropped out of school for nearly four years after ignoring her advice to stick with it (no exaggeration). Of course, she was right, and, in 2004, I went back to school, finished up my degree, and from there received my MFA at the University of Notre Dame. How ironic that, barely a week after my first book came out, I was privileged to hear Jaimy read from her award-winning Lord of Misrule at the Kalamazoo Public Library.

This event, with its local southwest-Michigan flavor, was a culmination for me. I reflected, while waiting in line to have Jaimy sign my copy of her book, on the good fortune I had to study with great writers in the Kalamazoo area while in undergrad. I realized, after Jaimy spoke on the importance for her of finding a character’s voice, how I, too, learned the importance of voice from her all those years ago. Voice is important in my recent book, and I knew in that moment that I owe Jaimy more than I had either suspected or remembered.

Though it comes from a true prodigal, I believe I can safely say that all of us who have studied with Jaimy know how good she is, how careful and precise and insightful are her critiques. I could not be happier on her behalf for the recognition she has received, and I can only hope to enjoy a touch of the same in the future. Also, if you have not picked up a copy of Lord of Misrule, do so. A great book to curl up with over the holidays!

-I did not have to think long in order to settle on Chad Sweeney’s Parable of Hide and Seek from Alice James Books. Chad is a writer who is also local to a Kalamazoo area rich in talent, and I fell in love with his new poetry during a reading he gave recently. In particular, his poems “Little Wet Monster” and “Holy Holy” struck such a personal chord with me that I had to acquire his book right away.

The first is an incantation, a welcoming, a calling forth of an unborn child: “Come antler through the gates my thingling/ Your grapes contain the houses// Unmask the stones my darkling grief/ Come whole my homeward early// You alone devour the night,” and so on. The child comes from the dark womb but brings the secret of light, a rich paradox among many in Parable. Mother and father voices merge somehow in a poem that Chad reads with a lot of courage and all the real passion of a father who appreciates the mystery and precious gift that is life. I jive with that, being a father of four with another on the way.

In “Holy Holy,” Chad also manages to get me where I feel it deep down. It begins, “For me speech is/ a way of touching,/ a rummaging under/ for what’s not meant// to be moved,” and continues, “a sentence begun// before my father was/ beaten for his stutter.” I adore the double to triple meanings of these enjambed lines as they turn on one another. The poet then asks for “courage/ to fail publicly// in ordinary tasks,/ give/ me corner beams laboring/ without grace.”

The humility and gentle sensibility of Chad Sweeney’s poems are, judging by his reading and conversation, wholly genuine. Their surreal yet familiar landscapes pull me in, and I think they will you, too. Give him a try at http://www.alicejamesbooks.org or your favorite seller. In fact, treat yourself to an entire Kalamazoo, Michigan, literary romp! There are plenty of authors to choose from, whether recently published or from years gone by.

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blue-eyed boy bait – Spilt Milk Mag #1

In anthology, Magazine on August 22, 2010 at 4:20 pm

-Reviewed by Caroline Crew-

blue-eyed boy bait is actually the first issue of Spilt Milk Mag, an identity crisis explained by the editor, Sam Peczek, by way of a copyright issue with a ‘brothel in Sweden with the same name’ that didn’t appreciate the free advertising. Although this is a print issue, Spilt Milk is currently a digital magazine, but may venture back into book form. It is a beautiful form too. The little touches of illustration are one of the few things that actually make this lit mag stand out, and definitely the only feature that makes it stand out in a good way.

The kindest thing I could say about this collection of ‘short form’ writing is that it is youthful. By youthful, I mean juvenile. While I normally enjoy reading the author biographies in literary magazines (with a bittersweet nosiness at all these wonderful people doing things that I am not), I was careful to comb them to make sure of the contributors’ ages. Surely, this must be a journal for teen writing, I thought, but no. There are an awful lot of clichéd themes: cheesy sex scenes in the thankfully brief ‘Fresh’ by Alexandra Glacet, strippers and abortion featuring in some truly dire depictions of the human condition. The impression of adolescence is further enforced by the pretentiousness that runs throughout. Particularly cringe-worthy was Naomi Headland’s ‘The Acid Test’ mixing Latin, French and the Greek mythic figure Icarus in a poem which could be subtitled ‘Look how smart I am!’.

Formally, the magazine seems a little confused. There are some longer pieces which conform to more traditional narrative ideas of short fiction such as Rez Dillon’s ‘Second Wave Theory’, and these are more successful. The shorter prose pieces are far from the honed precision of flash fiction, instead becoming indulgent and directionless paragraphs of purple prose. At times this can produce some interesting images: I particularly liked the bizarre description of swallowing a butterfly named Phillip in A.J. Patrick Liszkiewicz’s ‘Butterflies’.  These pieces left me unsatisfied, as if I’d been offered a few grains of rice instead of a bowl of risotto.

Perhaps blue-eyed boy bait / Spilt Milk Mag will deliver more on a digital stage, where short attention spans and dubious quality is more at home. However, if it wants to succeed in print, I would strongly suggest upping the quality of submissions and maybe getting a few other eyes involved. A nice looking magazine, but if you want a great compilation of short form writing, spend your pennies on Shot Glass Journal instead.

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