Travis Kurowski
MIscellany
Seven Great Lit Mags from 2011
Best of lists are by definition failures. They are subjective and, in most cases, arbitrary. But they can be useful for the conversations they create (often born from disagreement) and their recognition of quality; they bring attention to things. Though the media is awash with similar lists for albums, books, film, restaurants, and much else, I can’t recall ever seeing an annual one for the literary magazine—and 2011 was a great year for these magazine. What follows are seven literary magazine successes of 2011, in no particular order. Why seven? Lack of time, only. Many are missing from this list. Please add your comments; quality deserves recognition at the very least.
Triple Canopy 14: Counterfactuals
Without a doubt, Triple Canopy is one the most adept publishers at using the Internet as a unique medium with its own rules and possibilities (each issue brings with it an original online reading experience)—and TC also manages to be one of the best avant garde publications running in any medium. Issue 14, their “Counterfactuals” issue, is their self-proclaimed “first literary, or not not literary, issue,” and like most things put out by TC it is a mind bomb. The theme is summed up by Lucy Ives & Co. as “a sensibility both within and without form, genre, medium”—which includes diagram poems, performance pieces, semi-autobiographical surreal theater from Mina Loy, aphorisms from Sam Moyer, anthropology from Tan Lin, and more work way outside the box/screen.





















