ZYZZYVA 93 / San Francisco, CA
New England Review 32.3 / Middlebury, VT
DIAGRAM 11.4 / Tucson, AZ
Camera Obscura 3 / Addison, TX
Fiddleblack 2 / Peninsula, OH
Barrelhouse 9 / Washington, DC
Antioch Review Fall 2011 / Yellow Springs, OH
Birkensnake 4 / Providence, RI
Gigantic Sequins 2.2 / Philadelphia, PA
Paris Review 199 / Manhattan, NY
Bateau 4.2 / Northhampton, MA
6x6 24 / Brooklyn, NY
Nick Ripatrazone's recent work has appeared or is forthcoming in Esquire, The Kenyon Review, Mississippi Review, and the Beloit Fiction Journal. He is in the MFA program at Rutgers-Newark. His Luna Park articles on William H. Gass and Blake Butler and on LBJ: Avian Arts are available on the site.
West Branch63, the Fall/Winter 2008 issue of Bucknell’s semiannual, contains a rather conservative swath of poems, at least in the realm of structure and form. John Estes’s “Year: Two” is the lone exception, a four-page poem laddered in phrase and image. It is both welcoming and surprising, then, to see that James Harms’s essay
Contemporary flash fiction has been slugged, whipped, and slapped: dragged through the literary mud, pegged as incidental. While some appreciate the concision of the form, others hate the practice, positing that flash fiction has excised indelible elements of fiction, including pacing, profluence, and emotional resonance. Many of these criticisms are warranted. Often works of flash
William Gass—fiction writer and philosopher—has always focused on the accumulation of acerbic, image-driven language. Gass’s preface to his 1968 collection, In the Heart of the Heart of the Country, includes his impetus for writing “The Pedersen Kid,” his breakneck novella: “And I began by telling a story to entertain a toothache. To entertain a toothache
The announcement of a new literary magazine is often met with a terse response: Why? Detractors posit that market saturation has resulted in publication of nominal, superficial works, with provincial audiences at best. The LBJ: Avian Life Literary Arts, a new publication from the University of Nevada, Reno, has sufficient answers within an inaugural, Fall
Seth Abramson’s Poetics A poetics of economy often results in staid lines, the severe compression wrangling emotion from the verse. Yet such compression can also produce a curious mixture of specificity and spaciousness, as in the poetry of Seth Abramson. In an eight-poem set profiled in the current issue of the Notre Dame Review, Abramson
