The issue is focused on prose over poetry, though not to the deficiency of the latter. Although I enjoyed a number of pieces in the issue, I was invariably drawn toward, and returned to, a few in particular, a mixture of new names and writers I’ve encountered elsewhere. “The End of Jimmy” by Vincent Scarpa feels representative of the peculiar Monkeybicycle aesthetic: strong sentence level writing paired with an openness toward quirky and layered content. The story begins rather directly:

The accident was in the beginning of May, right after I kicked Jimmy out for the second time. He was drunk and walking through the streets when the eighteen-wheeler drove right into him.

Scarpa moves from objective to pointed a few sentences later:

Because I had found out that Jimmy was still fucking around with Claire just the day before, I was disappointed to hear [that his death was instantaneous]. I had hoped that each wheel went directly over his head, squishing it further and further into the road.

I love the narrator of this story; she’s honest, not only with about her flawed, failed relationship with Jimmy, but also about his “mama”—“She’s a big woman and I tried to pry her off of me. I don’t like being touched.” The mother’s visit creates even more awkwardness, situations that include Claire, Jimmy’s other love interest, who was “Ms. Louisiana in ‘89” and “a tough bitch.” The narrator’s honesty, though, shifts at an essential point in the story, and she admits to the malleable quality of truth within her narrative. I won’t reveal the twist, but it’s a clever undercut of the sarcasm established in the first half of the story, and the resulting tone feels indicative of the issue as a whole: stories that engage the reader through the quality of prose, yet not formulaic, more than willing to play with structure and narrative.

Aaron Burch’s “Sacrifice” commands the reader’s attention with the same quality of writing as Scarpa’s story, but Burch’s approach is different. Told in ten sections, the story is quite strong sentence to sentence, delivered with a reserved, reasoned tone. “Sacrifice” is about a lack of feeling—the moments when we are either unable to represent, or choose not to represent, the worlds that exist within us. While Scarpa’s story lays bare the elements of narrative, the craft of storytelling (and the desire to sometimes mess with the reader), Burch’s story moves with a through-line of measured grief, the themes unmistakably Old Testament at moments, with the continuous focus on brothers and consequence. Burch’s story uses the passive well and builds toward a King James cadence at moments:

And then, behind them, father and son discovered a ram, caught in the brush by its horns, and they removed the animal and let it to the altar and offered it to their God instead.

The narrative vacillates between these Biblical memories and narratives and the continuous present of the story. The memories, though, move the piece forward. The main character’s present actions live within such a Biblical world. He is living with grief because he was conditioned to grieve:

He memorized not only all Ten Commandments but also their corresponding numbers, and devised story problems, mixing math with theology.

Such backstory rehearses the deepest action of the story, what occurs “on the day of his brother’s funeral.” Burch slows down the narrative here, and I appreciate his attention to pacing. The character’s actions are so deliberate, and we are ready for, though still shocked by, what happens next:

In the kitchen, he emptied the freezer’s box of ice into the bucket on his kitchen table, pulled out and then sat in the seat, and lowered his left hand into the ice.

The story ends with a question, and the choice is appropriate to the ambiguity created—ironically—by such a deliberate, controlled story.

Two poems I especially enjoyed were “Maro and Raquel” by E. Michael Desilets and “Chipmunks” by Steve Peacock [audio link]. “Maro and Raquel” moves with impressive speed, line after line of images wrapped in tight phrases:

done-up damsels
trawling with the fishnet denizens
clustered in the subway club überground

Snapshots feels like the right word to describe the litany of images, since “Maro’s stuttering shutter snatch[es] . . . body parts at play.” The surrounding world, the “red lacquer wall in the background,” the world of representation, of created “stark wide angles” is more real than the human world. The other character named in the title, Raquel, “lurks,” her “nose too big hands too clammy eyes too lonely.” A caricature only made real through “that lens lunging her way.” The final image is so accurate in revealing the bleeding and blurring of the world of the photograph, with Raquel “tilted / against the glossy brick,” where “her longing / outshines lightning.”

“Chipmunks” is an excellent editorial transition from “The End of Jimmy.” The poem begins “Having arrived / at the choice”—a nice movement from the narrative malleability of the preceding story. This poems is grounded directly in the moment of a possible suicide set to the song “Whipping Post.” “Chipmunks” is arranged for visual reading, yet the narrative thrives on a continuation of acoustics complimenting the action. Music “slaps” from “screaming speakers” before “meander[ing]” and “vibrating” a photograph. Later the “throbbing bass penetrates / the square-bottled liter / of Jack on his lips” and “shattered glass sings as it scatters across the floor.” The poem remains in this moment as long as possible, though, seeing it through to the inevitable end of the song, with

                 The audience
of the live recording
     applauds his performance,
     fades to silence;

He questions: “What song shall I die to?” The turn here is hilarious, but darkly so, considering the poem never truly leaves the establish moment:

                 A-L-L-M-A-N
of the Allman Brothers Band
has been succeeded by the
                 A-L-V-I-N
of Alvin and the Chipmunks.

The final sound of the poem is

   a series of staccato
                 clanks
into the empty
                 metal
wastepaper basket
on the floor.

There’s much more work in this issue worthy of especial mention: Ori Fienberg’s clever “Clockwork Dog,” Andrew James Weatherhead’s refractive and smart “Something that Happened in Brooklyn,” the surreal “Hunger” by Matt Briggs [audio link], and “Rattle My Leaves,” an excerpt from Steve Himmer’s new novel. A strong issue of diverse and memorable work.

Adam Pendleton's System of Display, 2008-2009; Pendleton is interviewed by Thom Donovan in BOMB 114.

BOMB magazine has been publishing conversations between artists, writers, actors, directors, and musicians since 1981. It is where art and culture collide to provide the most intimate, raw, and scarily real portraits of this and the last century’s most influential people. Issue 114 / Winter 2010 most exemplifies this magazine’s mission. From beginning to end, it is quite impossible to set this issue aside. From the poetry of Larry Eigner, who “using his index finger and thumb to type each letter of every poem” affects “the spatial and temporal ‘shape’ of [his] poems”—

birdsong

back of the head

cloud

tree

branch

twig

leaves

street…

—to the translation by Jacquline Loss of Armando Suarez Cobain’s “Born on October Fourth,” a devastating portrait of a man yearning (as we do) for love. The narrator’s love object says, “I feel like I have known you years.” The narrator thinks: “I return to myself. I drink and agree. How tender—he thinks. And, after I remain silent for a bit. I am in a place that seems like happiness.”

And, if Cobain’s story isn’t enough to implore you to read the issue, how about an interview with recording artist “The Bug,” who Jace Clayton says is, “Soft-spoken, articulate, and generous,” but who also, “when you see him perform you realize that he’s a hardcore motherfucker who has dedicated his life to furthering the possibilities of music.” The Bug admits he, “Still wants to find vocalists who make the hairs on your arms stand on edge when you hear them, who have intensity and originality…” Much like this issue of BOMB.

Pulitzer-Prize winning poet Rae Armantrout, interviewed by Ben Lerner, comments:

The odd thing is I didn’t think about that as a conscious theme in this book [referring to Homer’s Odyssey]. It simply reflects an old preoccupation of mine. For some years this preoccupation had taken the form of an interest in quantum physics, which now, as you know, posits either the ‘standard method’, in which the smallest unit of matter is the ‘point particle’ or, alternatively, string theory, in which the basic unity of matter is a vibrating ‘string’. Maybe we could think of the word as a point particle and the line as a string.

Armantrout’s ideas pierce as heavy and deep as her poetry, and BOMB doesn’t miss a moment of it.

The final page covers a cartoon depiction of “Great Moments from the Letter of William S. Burroughs,” in which Peter Blegvad adds humor and simplicity to the already absurd Burroughs. In one picture, there is a rat in a cage, with a heading above that reads: “Mine is the love that dare not squeak its name.” Then, a man cross-legged in a chair, seemingly watching himself behind a sheer curtain, comments, “The only way I can write narrative is to get right outside my body and experience it. This can be exhausting and at times dangerous.” BOMB is not exhausting, though it’s the edgiest and most thorough glimpse of the pioneers of our time, old and new. Don’t let this issue escape.

Sonic Youth's 2004 album, "Sonic Nurse"

Moore—who, along with his wife Kim Gordon, was one of the founding members of Sonic Youth—designs the issue with some blast from the past photos (“forty years of intimate photographs”) that Gordon painted over. The entire thing reminds me eerily of the flood damaged photos found after Hurricane Katrina came through. It’s spooky, but more filled with the mystery and emotion of memory than your typical photo in an album. The paint seems to make them more real.

These are just a few of the questions Defunct, a new literary magazine, raises. In his essay Sum of Zero, Chris Offutt writes about the defunct literary magazine, Zero, A Review of Literature and Art, published just six issues between 1949-1954, and its last issue in 1980. Most famous for its publication of James Baldwin’s essay “Everybody’s Protest Novel,” which declared Richard Wright’s Native Son a failure, effectively ending the friendship between the two men, Offutt notes Zero’s lasting impact on the literary landscape. The Paris Review published its first issue four years after Zero’s, and copied their style and format as well as the now standard practice of publishing unknown writers alongside established ones.

Offutt writes:

The bulk of our contemporary literary magazines still rigidly follow a style established by a pair of bohemian, far Left, proto-beat poets engaged in something fresh and original and rebellious. How drastic it must seem to them now!  Their revolution in Art and Literature gave birth to the prevailing style– revolution co-opted and homogenized for the masses, producing the same jarring disconnect of stepping into an elevator and hearing sanitized tones of The Stones, The Clash, Nirvana, or Ludacris.

For Offutt, it is the duty of young writers to battle with the vanguard, and that “the best and most lasting assault is by making work as good or better than them.” He also warns young writers to heed the errors of the past. Baldwin regretted the loss of his friendship to Wright all his life. Offutt’s call to arms is a brilliant polemic and heartbreaking analysis of the cost, material and otherwise, of producing literature.

Looming cover aside, the layout of the journal intimidates me straight away. A quick flip through the pages shows all the prose together in one hefty section, the poetry following, all clumped together in their verse. (That arrangement always unnerves me; there’s something so rigid about it.)

I open the book, almost resistant, and I begin “Touch”, the first of three short stories. Another tale about the distance between a husband and wife. I brace myself for the slow pace—and before I know it there’s a babysitter mock breastfeeding their baby! The act is unsettling. And quirky. The sexual tension between the husband and the babysitter is almost a worry. (And quirky.) I’m captivated by the plot and the sorrow, and the near-comic manner in which author Candice Morrow tackles them. Then Melissa Lambert paints a masterful image in the story “When the Rains Came” (2009-10 AWP Intro Journals winner). I can still see the terrified and helpless cow being pulled out of waist-deep mud as a group of children look on through the door of their ramshackle school. Finally, Martin Cozza zigzags his way through ‘Pennsylvania Polka,’ and in the end manages to bring that thunder.

In the nonfiction, Rachel Jackson’s “Hellcat Court” slowed everything down for me. Jackson let comparisons and juxtapositions of black/white and ghetto/hip hop cultures remain surface. She presented them, then let them lie. (For example, She told us there was fear, but she didn’t attend to it.) A discerning interview with David Eggers by Anis Shivani follows. Finally, an essay. In the end I can’t help think three consecutive non-fiction pieces can be a lot to ask from a reader, and so I’m back to wanting to diversify the layout, back to being unnerved.

The issue’s penultimate piece is the last of the nonfiction works: “Songs Primarily in the Key of Life.” Brian Kevin takes us through the album of the People’s Temple Choir, He’s Able. If you’re not already experiencing goose bumps then you might need me to remind you that the People’s Temple Choir is the Jonestown Peoples Temple Choir. Some topics are just endlessly fascinating. That a preacher could rise to cult-status and drive 918 people to commit suicide—a third of those people being children—will never cease to astound. I’ve heard the story so many times, but this time it’s new. Kevin introduces us to various people in the choir—those who helped with the sound, produced the album, sang the lead vocals—and all along he’s giving us these animated descriptions of each utterly joyful soul-induced hymnal. The story gets personal, and what’s so appealing about that is it allows us to think of those who died in the Jonestown Massacre as individuals with histories, with real pain before the People’s Temple “lifted” their spirits. But of course we know the end of the People’s Temple, and there’s no reason to rejoice. That’s one of the lingering ironies of this piece. We’re on a rollercoaster of emotions. We want—actually can’t help—to feel happy when the story gets on a role, basking in the music:

The chorus of “Walking with You Father” has this great organ part floating around in the background. It’s wild and unrestrained and not completely on key, and when I hear it, I picture a googly-eyed monster from the Muppet Show band just wailing away on a Wurlitzer or a Hammond B-3. It’s like a carnival anthem on fast-forward, a series of whirring, scattershot chords as a pair of hands bounce with only vague intention from one assemblage of keys to the next. Above it, a pair of duelling divas channel their best Aretha Franklins, proclaiming:

Wash us!

Fill us!

Cleanse us with your power!

While we’re walking with you Father!

But always that reminder that these people died, and that their love for their God and the Christian faith was sorely taken advantage of. Kevin makes reference to it more than once, as if he’s constantly reminding himself: wait…should I get this carried away?…should I allow myself these excited paragraphs? It’s the kind of reading you can’t put down.

Sad to say I wanted, however, to put the poetry down. Not only are the poems all clumped together, but they are arranged alphabetically. I noticed that the fiction and nonfiction sections weren’t showcased alphabetically, so why the poetry? It took me eleven poems and nineteen pages to reach Michelle Hicks’s “Bellaghy” (another 2009-10 AWP Intro Journal winner), which is a tightly crafted and revealing poem about a woman’s visit to Seamus Heaney’s hometown, Magherafelt:

Stepping off the bus from Magherafelt,

I feel my ass pinched by a boy not yet

out of junior school and, deposited

all alone, am greeted by a quartet…

Yet I can’t say that a single poem before “Bellaghy” lingered. I’m of the mind that this wouldn’t have been the case if the editors had opted for the un-alphabetical route, forcing styles and tones to contrast and compliment—and, on that note, I found that the contrasting and complimenting techniques of the combinatory poetics of Trey Moody and Joshua Ware made the hair on my arms dance. There exists in the Moody/Ware works a “feeling” (or poem) element on the left and a “learning” (possibly prose poem) element to the right, and through the winding course of the elements’ dissected connections, we glimpse both humanity and history, humor and awareness. Hats off!

Yet one aspect of the sectioned-off layout always works for me: placing the book reviews at the back. Here, Darcie Dennigan’s reviews of The Tangled Line and Union! were as reflective as they were entertaining, as scathing as they were sympathetic. And I think Julie Carr helped me decide to seek out Andrew Zawacki’s latest, Petals of Zero Petals of One.

But I expected this particular section to work; keeping the reviews at the back is a very common practice with most journals, so I’m just used to it. Still, layout aside, I’m going to say that my introduction to Moody and Ware, my reading about the Peoples Temple with new eyes (and ears), and my discomfort at the teenager dry-feeding a baby with her breasts were more than enough. Succumb to the carnival tent.

My mother liked to remind me that at the age of four I left a garden party one rainy afternoon with my toothbrush in my fist, fully intending a life of exploration, only to be returned later that afternoon by the postman. Her version of the story emphasized the boundaries that her daughter refused to accept. Mine was about the emancipation I felt when I closed the gate latch behind me and left everyone in my wake, and the world came to meet me like a wave.

On April 1, 1930, the first night of my newest expedition, I had a walled garden overarched by thick trees all to myself, and still was unable to sleep. I considered rousing my muleteer early but summoned just enough self-discipline to let him rest.

Orion wheeled slowly over the village roofs, and the wind stirred the wraith of a dust storm. I lay listening to the soft and granulating sound of the fall of fine particles. In the starlight I could see the mica in the sand as it gathered on my palms…

After reading Mark Halliday’s essay, “Pushcart Hopes & Dreams,” in the current issue of Pleiades, however, it’s clear that my assumption was wrong. I guess if I had bothered to think about it, I’d have realized that this would be just too, well, democratic.

Halliday writes: “Each November 1 I receive a letter from the Pushcart Press inviting me (along with hundreds of other writers) to nominate works for the annual Pushcart Prize volume.” So, it’s not just the journals listed in the back that do the nominating; they also take nominations from established writers. Okay, I guess—more chances for the worthy but little-known writer to receive recognition for a particularly excellent piece of work. And now that I’ve gone searching for it, I see that they don’t hide the fact that their contributing editors nominate (they acknowledge it on their website). They do not acknowledge, however, that some of these contributing editors don’t nominate particular works, but a list of names.

Halliday continues:

…the easy, convenient way is for a ‘contributing editor’ to nominate writers rather than individual works.  All you have to do is list ten of your friends, if you want a quick way to do something nice.  Then Pushcart gets samples from your nominees, probably including some pieces that you the nominator have never seen.

Pleiades 30.1

Halliday goes on to say that he has had two prose pieces appear in Pushcart volumes that were “nominated by poet friends…who no doubt assumed they were nominating [him] as a poet and who had never even seen the prizewinning prose pieces.”

Okay, so this is a little bothersome, and it goes against everything that the anthology is about, or what the average reader assumes it’s about, which is recognizing the best (obviously subjective, but still, by someone’s estimation) individual stories and poems that were published in the previous year. I’m not heartbroken or anything, and I’m still going to buy the anthology, but I think it’s something of which readers (and Pushcart hopefuls) should be aware.

(Note: This issue of Pleiades (30.1) is pretty great, by the way. I really enjoyed Meghan Kenny’s story “I’ll Tell You What” and the 150+ pages of book reviews.)

Lee Misenheimer's cover art for American Short Fiction #47; "Super Puss", pencil and gouache

At the tail end of Virginia Quarterly Review editor Ted Genoways’s infamous (at least in some circles) Mother Jones essay about literary magazines, “The Death of Fiction,” Genoways pleads for contemporary short story writers to:

Stop being so damned dainty and polite. Treat writing like your lifeblood instead of your livelihood. And for Christ’s sake, write something we might want to read.

Such commentary about contemporary fiction may seem a bit harsh. But literary magazine readers—just like art gallery attendees and theater audiences—understand to at least some extent what Genoways is talking about. What they understand is that not all artistic production is good, and what’s more, maybe not even the majority of it is.

This is of course not isolated to the literary arts, and neither is it a new state of affairs. As long as humans have been making stuff there has been crap, mediocrity, goodness, and—few and far between—greatness. Painting, home construction, television, cooking, you name it. And who knows: maybe this is more true for short stories and literary magazines. I really couldn’t say.

Anyhow, all that isn’t news.

What might be news is that the new issue of American Short Fiction is stunningly good. Stunningly. (I don’t at the moment know how to say that without sounding like a cheerleader, so there it is.) To be clear: I don’t mean “stunningly good” in the literary way. Not in the “You should read The Cantos” way. I mean it more the other way. More the “You should read those Stieg Larsson books” way. The “Hot Tub Time Machine was hilarious” way. The page-turning, where-did-the-time-go, I-am-going-to-read-this-aloud-to-strangers-on-the-subway way. But in the literary way, too. (I like The Cantos.)

I mean to say the stories in the latest ASF issue are exciting. I read them aloud on the subway. I finished the issue in an evening in bed. The stories are exciting in the way both Raymond Carver and True Blood are. They are stories of “acrobats, cowboys, and a brick-carrying babysitters,” of cab drivers, giraffes, and Catholic school girls. They are stories written by this talented bunch: Laura van den Berg, Jeff Parker, Jamey Hecht, Susan Steinberg, Matt Bell, Mike Young, and Marie-Helene Bertino. They are stories that make you forget you are reading and remind you of why you like to listen. Van den Berg’s story “Acrobats” reminded me of all the best things about her own stories in What the World Will Look Like When All the Water Leaves Us, of the magic and mystery of them. It begins:

The day my husband left me, I followed a trio of acrobats around the city of Paris.

Reading Young’s story “Snow You Know and Snow You Don’t” was like being introduced to a young, mellowed out Thom Jones (author of some of the most talkative stories out there). It concludes elliptically:

When the world is the world and the us isn’t. Bluebirds and volcanoes. Circlesaws and pomegranates. Snow fell on the TAXI light, onto Private’s white ski cap, into Dan Mac’s mustache. Honeycombs of ice and millions more around. Listen. You will always want what you can’t feel. Snow is full of little things that fall, and I swear sometimes they all know each other.

All to say, the issue of ASF should be an answer to any problems readers might have with contemporary short stories and the magazines dedicated to publishing them.

Note: For more ASF right now, listen to Bertino read from and explain her story “Carry Me Home, Sisters of Saint Joseph” from the above issue on ASF’s first podcast episode. You can also read Ethan Rutherford’s claustrophobic ASF story “The Peripatetic Coffin,” which was featured in Best American Short Stories 2009. It begins:

The sound of iron walls adjusting to the underwater pressure around you was like the sound of improbability announcing itself: a broad, deep, awake-you-from-your-stupor kind of salvo. The first time we heard it, we thought we were dead; the second time we heard it, we realized we were. The third time wiped clean away any concern we had regarding our well-being and we whooped like madmen in our sealed iron tub, hands at the crank, hunched at our stations like crippled industrial workers. Frank yelled like a siren without taking a breath. Abel hooted like a screech owl. The walls pinged and groaned, but held their seams. We screamed for more.

Standing rabbits grace the wraparound cover of The Tusculum Review volume 6, their recent poetry prize issue. Ralph Slatton’s pen-and-ink drawing on the front and back of the issue is complimented by a five print set inside the magazine, enigmatic representations of creatures encapsulated by thick branches and ropes. Slatton’s work is a preface for the issue’s contents: eclectic, dark, with sufficient breadth to make the magazine more like a book than a collection of individual pieces.  Few magazines—with the notable exceptions of the Indiana Review, New England Review, The Kenyon Review—consistently produce single volumes that exist as collaborative wholes. The Tusculum Review manages a mix of autonomy and unity, a strong example of the text-based approach to literary magazine editing, producing issues that exist as works of a unified vision, not merely anthologies of submissions.

Allison Joseph, editor of Crab Orchard Review, served as the final judge for the poetry prize, and two of her poems appear in the issue. “Newbie Runner” grasps the religious cadences of running through the perspective of an athlete returning to the sport—“muscles that haven’t spoken in years learning / this new language”—and avoids the even-muted sentimentality so often present in sport literature.  The poem concludes with the observation that the “miles I tally / in my sweet red book” become an obsession: “How close this comes / to addition, junkie behavior or worship.” Joseph’s choice for the prize, Nancy K. Pearson, is represented by six poems, most of which are marked by association of image and theme. The choice to include multiple pieces by a prizewinner is smart. Often winners of poetry contests appear arbitrary and one-note, while Pearson’s mini-collection portrays a stronger ability.

Nancy K. Pearson

Other notable poems in the edition include John M. Chávez’s “Dust of Industry, Spring” (“Evening interred again / a stand of pine shadows / is a cemetery”), Darin Ciccotelli’s long poem “Cyclops” (“Boys race.  Boys uncrinkle their kneeskin. / Feel on their necks the sun’s brawn”), and Doug Ramspeck’s “Medicine” (“This is the garland they must wear: / the swamp smell clinging to the skin / as fetid dream.”). The best poem of the issue, Christopher Salerno’s “Protest Songs,”  begins “Every kiss has an army” and continues, focused and terse, bound by an implicit and explicit “us.”

The prolific and always-engaging Stephanie Dickinson has three prose poems/flash fictions in the issue, each with a pinch of the macabre. “(43)” has a father saying “You’ll always be my little girl.  My love for you won’t suffer”—followed by narrative, “I licked the cheesecake from his spoon.  A trapdoor has been kicked into my guts.” “(41)” continues the mood, where physical and emotional pain coalesce, the literal existence of either irrelevant: “Bitter dandelion and shad grass.  He unfleshes my bones and says he is dressing me.”

Jan LaPerle’s “Purple Heart” is an excellent compliment, another compressed piece with a lyric, dark quality. In it, Lonnie Lee Oliver discovers his wife “hanging from a rope in the barn.” LePerle steps back in the succeeding sentences, noting “a spring calf frolic in a far field” and how sunlight “split his wife into two pieces.” Lonnie “worked less and less in the fields” after the death of his wife, instead writing “sad postcards.” The second-half of the piece becomes nearly fantastical in order to replicate Lonnie’s pain, and the final paragraph is a beautiful representation of pain: “He screamed and the snows around his house melted.”

It was refreshing to see eight non-fiction pieces appear in this issue, though not surprising, as two of the advisory board members—Patrick Madden and Michael Martone—are accomplished practitioners of the genre. Several are worth specific mention: Susan Bryant’s “Madame X’s Soup Pot” is a tale of that stained cast-iron pot’s travel from “a family of ‘pieds noirs’”—French Algerians—to Bryant’s own kitchen. Cassie Keller Cole’s “Full Stop” is a wonderful meditation on the punctuations of prose and life: “The purpose of original notation was musical: when to give emphasis, speed, emotion, volume.  Spaces gradually invaded, came between words and created new boundaries.” Considerations of prose become considerations of body: “Menarche and menstruation allow a slight pause in time for me to reflect on a consistent, unadvertised, basis. My period is mine: so private yet linking me to other women.” Catherine Curtis’s hilarious “Smells” begins with an appropriate jewel from Montaigne (“To smell good is to stink”) followed by “I can’t remember if I put on deodorant this morning.” Curtis’s prose is beautiful in representing the rank: “Odor seemed to rise from the white floor tiles like steam, to sigh out of the small red lockers.” Like the non-fiction of William Gass, Curtis curls all possible meanings from the concept of smell, a convention also adopted by Jennifer Nicole Sullivan in a later essay in the issue, “Mustachio.”

Michael Danko’s “Red” is the most dynamic work of the issue; again, like Gass, Danko unpacks a color—red—through all of its existences. The discovery of such a piece in a literary magazine is met with thanks (and further thanks that Danko’s piece is merely the best of many good works in the issue). Danko’s essay is encyclopedic without being overwhelming, full of litanies and observations, though grounded in common sense and humor: “When you roll out the red carpet for someone, that someone is a very important person, like Red Auerbach. And my favorite excerpt:

The flame of shame seems to be an involuntary physiological revelation of some plan (or just stray plain hope) you want to hide.  Blushing reveals desire, libidinous infatuation, fantasy, or perhaps some other hidden agenda (or unrequited emotion) that some of us work like devils to keep concealed.  Sometimes, as Adam Phillips writes, the unexamined life is worth living.  Other times, perhaps, public confession is good.  Determining the correct place and time for each is the trick.

Danko’s prose is always self-aware and avoids the appropriation of infallibility that dogs so much of today’s intellectually-minded creative non-fiction.  The same is true for this entire issue: palpable prose—sometimes dark, always honest—with a healthy sense of humor and self.

Please publish fewer stories written by post-MFA academics living in New York City.  I still love you, but I’m getting tired.

Thank you,

Mary Miller

Open City 29

1. Bitter

Open City is one of two literary magazines that I currently subscribe to, and it’s a magazine in which I’ve always dreamed of having my work appear.  I have an Open City tote I carry around, feeling a little bit cooler than everyone else in Mississippi.  But with each issue I receive, I feel a bit less so.

The magazine used to be better—more interesting, engaging, risk-taking, with more stories and poems I found myself rereading.  I still read my back issues of Open City, particularly issues seven through nine, and I love them almost as much as I love my three issues of the defunct print version of Swink.  Back then, Open City contributors were more likely to be nobodies (though, to be fair, they were disproportionately nobodies from New York) who had simply written a good story or poem.

According to Duotrope, Open City is ranked #7 on the slothful list (the markets with the slowest mean average response times reported).  I can attest to this.  I have yet to receive a rejection from them that fell under the 365-day mark.  The last thin, inkless slip I received had to track me down in another state.

2. Sweet

I’m done bitching. I want to say that Open City 29 is STILL far better than your average literary magazine, and worth picking up, if only for Terese Svoboda’s poems, Antonya Nelson’s “Hello, this is Bob.,” and Leopoldine Core’s “When Watched.”

I want to say something about Svoboda’s poems. Though I read quite a bit of poetry, I don’t know anything about it. I don’t know how to write it without using obvious metaphors. I don’t know what all the white space is doing. I can’t imagine people writing good poetry without being very, very messed up.  All I know is if something works for me—and these five poems did.  This is the final stanza in the first in the series, titled “Dove-Whirr”:

But smoke reaches.

I’m no one, we say, over and over,

though with oxygen. We slink, cocktail dress by

dress, into girl positions,

wearing black already.

Goof up now and the dryer

will tumble on in darkness.

While I don’t really understand what’s going on here, I can see the smoke reaching and I know I am also no one and I, too, am always trying to arrange my body into pleasing “girl positions,” even though it makes me kind of hate myself.  These poems made me feel things that I can’t articulate; they made me want to reread them and try to make connections I missed the first time.

Another highlight is Antonya Nelson’s essay, which begins with Nelson sending copies of her first book to her relatives: her brother complained that she’d exposed the family’s secrets and her grandmother kept the book on her coffee table only to announce that it was “nothing but smut” to anyone who inquired (I love that).  I think most writers have made this mistake at some point.  Not long ago, I saw one of my father’s relatives at a party and she told me she’d read my story collection.  Since there was nothing to do but ask what she thought, I did, and she said, “If I didn’t know you, I’d have thought you were the saddest girl in the world.”

Nelson’s essay explores the balance between writing what she wants to write about, while also staying in the good graces of her friends and family.  She says, “I can only hope that I’ve interrogated the autobiographical sufficiently and arrived at the ideal: a fiction that can be made of no other configuration.  Too much distortion can pull you, the author, away from your initial interest in the material.  Too little tweaking can leave you open for losing friends or disappointing your children.”

Lastly, not only does Leopoldine Core have a really neat name, but this is her first publication, and—other than Svoboda’s poems—this is probably the only piece in the issue that I’d read again.  The voice is strong, as are the images and details: “Theo felt buzzed.  She sauntered past a long line of kids waiting with orange trays.  Then past exhausted lunch ladies who leaned with big drippy spoons over vats of hot meat in sauce.”  So many of the images are ones that we already have in our heads but they’re so vivid that they bring us back to this place—to our elementary schools with their tiny toilets and rectangular pizza slices and the girl who brought a tupperware container full of mayonnaise every day to slather on her sandwiches.