{ bee + spool }

Contents of a postcard received in the Wednesday afternoon mail:

Top Ten Things
You Can Do For Literature

10. Read the current issue of ZYZZYVA cover to cover.
9. Give a free issue to a friend (just send ZYZZYVA the address).
8. Give a gift subscription to a friend.
7. Link to http://www.zyzzyva.org on your blog or website.
6. Check in to the ZYZZYVA blog every day.
5. Mention ZYZZYVA in your blog.
4. Renew your subscription without being asked more than once.
3. Nominate the editor for a MacArthur “genius” grant.
2. Make a token grant of your own.
1. Make a tax-deductible gift commensurate with your capacity to contribute.

Here’s poetry review #4 for National Poetry Month. Previously posted, reviews 1 , 2 and 3.

Pegasus Books Downtown is proving to be fertile ground for limited edition, locally-produced chapbooks and journals, including my own DIY chap, which it is carrying as of this past Thursday. (Thanks, Clay Banes!) A find this week is the I-got-the-last-one-there, 100-quantity poetry journal Mrs. Maybe (Issue 1) edited by Lauren Levin and Jared Stanley. The 46-page publication includes their poems as well as two by Sandra Lim (author of Loveliest Grotesque, a recent (2006) Kore Press first book award winner) and the work of thirteen others. Bearing creamy ecru pages under navy cardstock, I was drawn to the cover that looked possibly like a Gocco-job (a device near and dear to my heart), or other screenprinting process. With a circulation of a hundred, the journal is small and handsome. This is no mere superficial consideration, as I discussed one recent evening with Barb and Oscar on the wondrousness of small-press publishing and the sadness of the chapbook contests and micropress outfits out there that really miss the mark (sometimes quite literally, as when the a poet’s work is published with poor page-gutter considerations, mis-stapling, toner-streaked pages, etc.).

Onto the guts: The array is fairly diverse, with poems committed to the structure of stanzas to prose poems to more experimental forms. What catches my eye at times tends to be the familiar, so, having read Lim’s Loveliest Grotesque, I’ll pick out her “Please, Don’t Call Me Sandy” to excerpt, where she writes on name as identity, but identity as undetermined and incomplete:

First, “It just wears me down. / A used-car salesman / my whole life. / A dog in a Broadway musical. // Oh what a feeling. What a pale furry feeling this is.”

And last, “For what did I know of anything, / shedding & barking, / lying on the floor / like this, calling my name.”

Issue 1 seems a little insular, a private affair amongst a small group who nod at you from the bookshelf, but aren’t exactly extending their palms for a handshake and introductions; missing from this first volume are the journal’s mission and the poets’ biographical notes, though the origin of the journal’s name is explained on the last page.

While the supply of Mrs. Maybe is dwindling around local Bay Area bookstores, there “may be” issues 2 and 3 in the works, according to the journal’s blog.

Today, poetry review #3 for National Poetry Month. Reviews 1 and 2 are here and here.

Dan Magers‘ spooky teen/frat/sorority horror sonnets are collected in the clever Exploitation Poems (Immaculate Disciples Press 2007), a 32-page square-shaped chapbook that I recently found at Pegasus Books in downtown Berkeley. Framed under muted olive covers (with silkscreen art) and Japanese stab binding, this handmade chap includes response illustrations to Magers’ poems by Matt Bollinger, who also designed the book. Both art and poetry underscore the lesson to be imparted from all teen horror flicks: If you get it on with a co-ed or fall asleep in the woods, you’re dead.

The chapbook begins with “Frat House Massacre”. Lest you wonder about its outcome, “Frat House Massacre II” is in store for you on page 14. Given the contemporary theme, one may figure a grouping of poems in some free verse manner, but the poems are structurally marvelous for a writer who is reading both for pleasure and to learn how to write (like me). (You can read the sonnets in a duh-DUM-duh-DUM-duh-DUM fashion, which is a very pleasant activity on the short BART commutes this chap and I’ve been riding.) Magers honors the 14-line form and rhythm throughout.

Poetry, and this set in particular, suits the idea of horror being more horrible when left to the imagination (where more is said when it is unsaid). Exploitation Poems becomes increasingly gory in later pages, and poems such as “Pyongyang Experiment Camp” and “The Lurid Method of Dr. Mamoto” departs from the sorority-carnage theme and re-creates in sonnets the plots of the Yellow/Oriental monster also found in the exploitation-fear-flicks genre. Magers’ uses the vehicle of poetry, the compact space of the pages and the line limitations of the form with creepy swellness, as in the poem, “Cheerleader Rout”: “Until they sleep, the lights are on. They sleep… / and then unlighted rooms come creeping red.” Then, “The Johnson’s dog is barking– / forced unquiet in the assured silence.” When the Johnson’s dog comes abarking, you know it’s going to be a long night.

Exploitation Poems is an edition of 100. A few copies were available at Pegasus the few weeks ago I got this. Otherwise, try emailing Immaculate Disciples Press (Brooklyn, NY) here.