First Proof, BOMB’s summer 2008 literary pull-out, offers readers lively experiments in form and content from fine writers including Gary Indiana, Keller + Kuhn, Fiona Maazel, and Tom Healy. In Sally Dawidoff’s structural poem “No Sparkly Pens, Please,” domestic unrest is organized as a grammar exercise, recalling Margaret Atwood’s “Happy Endings”:

Under the category of Miscellany, the reader is asked to identify the correct case of a pronoun:
a. Pronouns keep prose from being boring, as in this example: “Charlotte snuck a joint and Charlotte attended a faculty meeting and Charlotte Charlotte Charlotte…”
b. If I’m working on my issues so that I can respect myself as a fully realized person, myself is a reflexive pronoun.
c. Precision helps us to communicate clearly. You say, “You like him more than me.” Do you mean “You like him more than you like me”? Or do you mean “You like him more than I like him, so you can go ahead and see him because my marriage is a sham, whereas you two are clearly destined to be together?”

Karen Thompson’s “House”, selected by Amy Hempel for BOMB’s 2007 Fiction Prize, centers on two ex-lovers traveling in Mexico, who decide to camp out in the ruins of a house in Baja.

This house was dying—that’s the way we felt. It was returning its parts to nature. I was always sweeping sand out, and sand was always drifting back in. “Ten years from now,” Jacob predicted, “I bet this house will be completely gone.”

Political turmoil threatens to upend their reconciliation when they hear about kidnappings in the area. The scenes in this nicely-paced story are taut, spare, and unexpected.

I tried not to let it bother me. Worrying didn’t suit the lifestyle. We went on with our days as usual. Weeks went by. A red tide struck; algae turned the ocean brown and kept us out of the water. It was poison for the jellyfish. Dead ones washed up on the beach by the hundreds. They were all the same kind, as big as Jell-O moulds, all a bright patterned pink. We loved the sight of them. They were so pretty. It didn’t matter that they were dead.

The 2nd installment of BOMB’s Fiction for Driving Across America, is Patrick Dacey’s “Patriots”, which invokes small-town surveillance in the first days of the war on terror, and in “Maag & Minetti: City Stories,” the Swiss duo Keller + Kuhn gives us absurdist vignettes of pulp noir. Maag considers the upside of mistaken identity in “Aura” when, believing he is the serial killer Harry the Butcher, women begin to flock to him.

Marjorie Welish’s abstract poetry and art are also showcased in this issue. Welish inverses E.M. Forster’s famous dictum: “‘The king died and then the queen’ is a story. ‘The king died and then the queen died of grief’ is a plot,” in her piece “Spacing” through the interplay of line breaks and word formation. (For a wonderfully faithful and funny execution of Forster’s example, see Ron Carlson’s “Grief.”)