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Winter 2009

Issue Highlights

A Poem for Nancy Pelosi, Oprah and Bezos, More Inconvenient Truth, Darfur 1: The Boy, Home is The Temple of The Dole, First Death, Sexy Quictions, Barely Harvest, Stars and Firecrackers, The Inflation Rate of Tyranny, Pissaro's Pontoise Post-Op, W is For War, plus art galleries like Infrared Napa and A Life of Sand, and much more ... Read More

Articles

The Inflation Rate of Tyranny
Mugabe has come face to face with his most threatening foe ever: hyper inflation. Further, this is one enemy he can't beat with iron bars which has completely flummoxed the old crocodile who has always believed there is no problem that can't be literally whipped ... Alex Keto reports. Read More

Lots of Reviews

The Extraordinary Times of Ordinary People
The only trepidation I had with my prejudgment was the old-fashioned people on the cover, making me imagine this might be some boring, depression-era, boring, let's save-all-the-tuna cans story. It wasn't. Ryn G. reviews the novel by Mark Carp. Read More

Emerson Meets Wall Street
But if we taxed intelligently, and channeled our resources from a war economy to a green and virtual one (i.e., the next level of the Internet), we could very well find ourselves with increased wealth ... and a much happier population. Don Thompson contemplates utopia.Read More

My Soviet Union
Presented as a four-part meditation on the ways one's country shapes one's identity, each section of My Soviet Union depicts this idea from a different point of view, using puns and unexpected associations ... K. M. Darling reviews the poetry of Dumanis. Read More

Home is Temple of The Dole
Uncle Sam is contemplating the single largest eminent domain land-grab since the Bolsheviks repoed the Czar's palaces. Called the Ponzi Omnibus Reconciliation & Killer Yard Sale Act, or PORKYS for short ... Norm B gets funky. Read More

The Miracle Letters of T. Rimberg
They rail against the likes of Bill Clinton and Madonna "in 1986 you caused me to have an erection that lasted for eight days. Look at the horrifying little pop singers you helped spawn. Their music is all about vibrating sex organs ... Alison Morse reviews Geoff Herbach. Read More

More Inconvenient Truth - Sarah Palin Notwithstanding
The real question is what this means to us – certain disaster or just a mild winter? ... One side points to every hurricane as proof of climate change while the other side feels vindicated by a snowy winter in Wisconsin. Mike Z reports.Read More

Jack: A Beanstalk Life
The dimwitted ne'er-do-well of the fairy tale may be craftier than he's given credit for. Sure, we knew he was forced to live by his wits, but what do we actually know about his ambition? Is he just the biggest con man in literature? Roman Gladstone reviews Joanne Lowery. Read More

Approaching The Obama Phenom By Way of Ishmael
This moment in American politics really is unique – and perhaps our greatest novel, Melville's Moby-Dick, can be useful in trying to understand it. Joe Bertolini compares and contrasts. Read More

Tony Hoagland Sends His Love
Is Tony a racist? Oh, good folk on both sides and multiple skin types have had something to say on this ... Hoagland parries with ducks which leads to Palestine which leads to love ... Laura M. writes a Wikipedia-like review of TH. Read More

When Currency Becomes a Fiat For Oxygen
Beyond even these technical machinations, there is a ghost in the machinery of the currency complex that betrays a measure of irrationality, a non-quantifiable 'fealty' to dollars. Call it a force of habit ... Norm Ball gets scary! Read More

Madre
"The Towel," for instance, refers to the rag with the baby's puke and effluences, with which the mother cares for her baby. To the husband, Norm, it symbolizes the repulsive messiness of child-care. Charles R. on Leslie's short collection. Read More

American Poetry: Vietnam and Today - Greg M Reflects
Vietnam era poets have something to tell us today. This partially is true because U.S. literary journals at the dawn of the 21st century rarely publish verse of any relevance to our era's social and political upheavals. Read More

Another Woman Who Looks Like Me
To the rest of us, the poems seem to be recurring dreams ... sunk like stones in the muck of "reality." David Godine reviews an old book by Lifshin - we're not sure why. Read More

Will Oprah make the Kindle a Bestseller?
Sony has a looming opportunity to grab market share ... GSM would enable downloads anywhere in the world, while the Kindle downloads work only in the US. Read More


Quictions
Quictions

Stars and Firecrackers
by Philip Stohminger

She was the dominant partner. She’d taken him originally, after a festive summertime celebration in Dupont Circle, as if she were deflowering a virgin. Read More

Wasn't That Much Trouble To Do
by Laura McCullough

I barely had to lift my skirt before he was on me, and it didn’t take too dang long for them guards to catch on to what was going down because he couldn’t keep quiet and the rest of the men in all them cells could hear him and smell us ... Read More

Sugar Time
by Margaret Gilbert

In Europe, a boy with green eyes and long lashes, whom I had never seen before, took me into the back of a print shop and made love to me over the summer. Then he looked at his watch and said he had to go. Read More

First Death
by Nancy Corbett

That’s when you started having nightmares,” my mother always said. Well, no. I’d been having nightmares for a long time. This was when I started to wake up screaming. Read More

What This Country Is All About
by Robert Duncavage

The young man did not attribute his father’s liberation to God, however, who frequently gets the credit in these situations ... Read More

Nest
by Dawn Abeita

They had a mutual fondness for drippy, old black and whites, movies the kids would give her a hard time about watching, mainly because they didn’t want to join her in watching them and they had only one TV. Read More

Pre-Op
by Scott Provence

The tubes are suddenly pumping something new under your skin. Jake is flexing his muscles in the reflection of the window. You imagine the surgeons opening you up, and something wonderful and delicious spilling out. Read More

Lady in The Other Bed
by Clarinda Harriss

She go to the bathroom ALL THE TIME. Walk to the bathroom with that witch hair hangin all down. Hold a big black pocketbook. She see me lookin at that pocketbook. Read More

Romeo, Romeo
by Barbara DeCesare

Todd slid the ring off her finger, yanked on his jeans and left the hospital, barefoot.  Lucy, from under the oxygen mask and a layer of coma, knew this would happen ... Read More

The Seeker of Truth
by Paul Dickey

Newton was exactly right, totally on the apple so to speak. He had already bought out Journalism for a mere $5B. Why not Science? Read More

Thoughts
by Jonathan Stein

The buzz in her head would not quit. She wished it to, even if she had to take a pill to sleep, even if she had to imbibe her scotch, even if she had to travel the three hours to their country house outside Mexico City. Read More

Laundry
by Pamela Painter

One by one, she pairs them off. Sure enough, when she reaches bottom there's two don't make a pair. She holds the socks up for Jessie to see, then she ties them together anyway. It's always a mystery she says. Read More



 


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