Our new issue is live and kicking on the site, and chock full of fine writing.Aside from our anniversary issue, we seldom solicit work surrounding a single theme, although happy accidents do arise. The pieces in this issue employ alienation, either at the formal or topical level to expose a greater personal truth.
*There is something unsettling about Johhny's assertion, "You're a whore" in Nancy Lynn Weber's flash Sugar Cone, and something true about the narrator's obsession with the dirty body.
*In Jon Stone's poems, violence is juxtaposed with ordinary past time, exposing the savagery of our culture, and the queer way in which this violence satisfies.
* Laurah Norton Raines' short story, Twenty-Seven, has a protagonist who is psychically uncomfortable with her new status as housewife, a role which is both too-familiar to her and incongruous with her conception of herself.
*In Invisible War, Lea Povozhaev negotiates the cultural and political differences between her own middle-class American upbringing, and her husband's childhood in iron-curtain Russia, and the implications these differences will have for their son, Viktor.
* Nancy Bauer's piece The N-Word explains the ways in which we are alienated from language, and how Don Imus' insensitive comments have exposed a cultural climate of intolerance that we must, willingly or unwillingly, participate in.
* Peter Schwartz's art nicely compliments this issue, with black and white representations of shock and morbid interest.
Please enjoy this issue, and feel free to post reactions to it in the comments below.
1 comment:
Nancy Lynn Weber's "Sugar Cone" is so fine. It's an unsettling single freeze-frame that works perfectly, complete as is.
Great stuff!!
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