Star*Line July/August 2009
After some excellent advice from a friend who shall be named if she wishes, I have decided to post this review with comments disabled. You are, of course, free to respond to it in your own space.
The cover of this issue of Star*Line employs some standard, and problematic, genre tropes: the non-human is personified as a doe-eyed, pouty-lipped woman, presumably inspired by Sedna based on the sea creatures and seaweed caught in the waves of her hair, though she looks awfully white for the role, and the representatives of humanity that she has ensnared are comprised of three heavyset, hirsute men and a fair woman whose own hair blends into that of the non-human. This woman is foregrounded in a more vulnerable and seductive position than the men, a single long-lashed eye peering out at the beholder in what might be threat or invitation. The eye also doesn't look positioned quite right on the face, pulling in the Uncanny Valley effect. It's certainly not an image that encourages lingering or lending your copy out.
The Table of Contents includes an unfortunate typo in the late Gene Van Troyer's name, first noted by Mike Allen, I believe. On balance, the editorial notes include an apology to Wade German for the misattribution of his poem, "Changeling," in the last issue. The poem is also republished in this issue, a smart editorial decision, since part of the pay poets receive is in contributor's copies that include our bylines. There's also a note that there wasn't room for an article in this issue. Given that this is the SFPA's newsletter as well as a poetry market, exclusive space for at least one article in each issue strikes me as something to be seriously considered.
The first poem in this issue is "Japery," by Robert Borski. The narrator speaks of his prank-prone parents in terms that carry the strong implication his parents were extraterrestrial. The image of the narrator's lunch is a fun one, but overall I didn't feel this piece brought anything new to a standard genre theme. I also felt the line breaks in the piece to be arbitrary and the language without any strong rhythm, so that this could as easily have been a flash piece as a poem. Once again, I'm left with the impression that the slot of first poem in Star*Line is merely filler between the Editor's Notes and the President's Message. Considering the significance with which the first slot is usually imbued in magazines, collections, and anthologies, a better option might be a small visual art piece inserted into the space, so that the first poem is given more room to make an impact.
Speaking of the President's Message, this issue's is a copy of Deborah P Kolodji's "Open Letter to the SFPA Membership," cross-posted to the SFPANet mailing list and the spec_poetry community, as well as the President's own Livejournal. The substance of the letter addresses the resignation of Malcolm Deeley, the SFPA's Secretary, plans to organize the SFPA as a 501(3)(c) non-profit, and debate that arose after my last Star*Line review which, in the interests of full disclosure and not as a means to open the discussion again, resulted in Stephen Wilson sexually harassing me in the spec_poetry community. Note that I am not entertaining argument from apologists or deniers, and cannot express strong enough disgust for such sentiments. Kolodji states an intent to create a discussion forum with policies in place to curtail personal attacks and harassment, and a desire for such behaviors to be curtailed in all SFPA interactions. These are worthy goals, and I'll be interested to see how they pan out.
The second poem of this issue is "Robotics," by Andrei Dorian Gheorghe. This is a meditation on the theme of a man who feels treated like a machine among people behaving as machines, his dreams, creativity, and humanity stifled. It's not a new concept, nor does Gheorghe take it in an unexpected direction, but the rhythmic repetition of slightly awkward, formal phrases strongly underscores the message.
"Robotics" is followed by the reprint of Wade German's "Changeling," about which I said in my review of the last issue:
Again, I found the language of this piece lacking, with no particularly standout lines, no strong rhythm to draw me from one word to the next.
This is also a problem with Wade Green's "Changeling," the subject of which is more to my taste, but I can't help comparing it to the Changeling poems featured in the current issue of Goblin Fruit, which I recently reviewed. The imagery in this poem feels rather faded, and there are no new insights into either the Changeling nor her parent.
Duane Ackerson's "The Bermuda Triangle" is fresher in phrasing, if not content. This poem posits that the mysterious force behind the infamous location is actually mobile. Though I did wonder why the locations specified in the poem were all in the U. S., I found the imagery solid and many lines evocative:
...don't realize it's hard to catch
a moving target
and easy to be caught by it.
Denise Dumars' regular column "Stealth SF: Finding Speculative Poetry in Non-Genre Magazines" usually deals with examples of speculative poetry to be found in mainstream literary magazines. In this particular issue, Dumars discusses the origins of the idea for the column, and emphasizes that the markets on which she focuses are markets that are open to submissions, thus providing speculative poets with new spaces to place their work. Particularly in light of this aim, a complementary column focusing on speculative markets might be an idea to entertain for the future.
From the Small Press brings a review by Joshua Gage of Cinema Spec: Tales of Hollywood and Fantasy, edited by Karen A. Romanko, with special focus on the poems in the volume.
The issue returns to poetry of its own with "Ice-Rats," by Morgan Bloodaxe. The ice-rats are apparently miners who go to the surface of some moon in the hopes of striking it rich, one way or another. They support a Boomtown, already failing again as whatever they're mining taps out. The phrasing and imagery in this poem builds a solid sense of place, and the rhythm moves along as relentless and inevitable as the cycle being described, new miners coming with hope, old miners learning better, all of them knowing the mines won't produce endlessly:
They're grizzled, or they're starry-eyed,
and some are broke when they arrive.
The hookers and the merchants
eat the ones with cash alive.
"Vacation Plans," by Deborah P Kolodji runs on a similar theme, though it manifests differently. A couple have taken vacations to the stars, but now the man is no longer interested in leaving earth:
He wants to walk in ancient forests
sing primordial songs,
kiss her in beds of fallen leaves....
There's a sense of distance in the poem's formatting, fragmented stanzas illustrating the loss of connection between man and woman made clear by their conflicting "dream vacations."
"Grandfather Paradox," by Francis W. Alexander is not so strong a piece, reliant as it is on the tired trope of a man going back in time to sleep with his grandmother, thereby becoming his own grandfather. I get the impression this one is meant to be sly humor, but even the joke is tired, and Oedipus and Freud could really use a rest.
Next are conference reports, one for Diversicon 17 and one for the Cinema Spec Book Launch Party. With so many reports on events that have already happened, perhaps a calendar of events would be a useful thing to incorporate into the newsletter concept of Star*Line, so more people know about poetry-related events in their area and can deliver even more reports.
"Frame House or Cave Entrance," by Peter Layton, reads as something of a tribute to SFPA Grandmaster Ray Bradbury, using imagery that draws from Bradbury's vast body of work. Pieces of this type have more resonance for an audience familiar with the allusions, and I am not sure Layton's work is entirely successful without that familiarity. There is, nonetheless, a minimalist lyricism to Layton's phrasing, reminiscent of both Bradbury and well-known translations of Pablo Neruda:
You can put a conch shell to your ear
or an automobile part.
Kurt MacPhearson's "Infomercial Teaser Targeting 98-pound Weaklings, c. 2100" achieves a more staccato rhythm, playing with the standard image of a bully kicking sand into someone's teeth.
The July/August poetry news is a brief treasurer's report and notice of the SFPA Online Halloween Poetry Reading, which has gone live with the first few poems received. If you have an audio file of yourself reading one of your Halloween-themed poems, or are inclined to make one, this is a great opportunity to get it heard.
The next poem is "(You Are Here) Multiverse," by Gene Van Troyer, part of a series of poems he wrote playing with the concept and phrase "you are here." As one of those who gave him input when he was posting drafts of these poems to the Wicked Verse mailing list, I realize I am biased, but I did like how this particular poem turned out. Some of the imagery and phrasing reminds me of T.S. Eliot's "Four Quartets," with an interesting twist incorporating questions of existence and identity as related to virtual and cyberspaces. This piece is followed by a brief memorial by Bob Frazier, and a few URLs to online memorials and an obituary. Rest in peace, Gene.
Two more "from the small press" reviews follow the spotlight on Gene Van Troyer, one an anthology, the other a collection. If you're looking to add to your library of speculative poetry, the reviews in "from the small press" are a good place to look for titles.
"Even here," by assu, is an sfnal take on Christmas Eve. Unfortunately, it doesn't have the punch necessary for such a short piece in a visual filler position.
"The Lecture of the Bees," by Dennis Braden, leads me to once again ponder the disproportionate number of fictional women written by men who define themselves by their breasts and desperately want children versus the number of actual women, based on my own experience, who are likely to do either of those things. It's not that there aren't women who do, it's that literature by men is awfully preoccupied with that segment, which preoccupation is tedious for the rest of us. This is not even getting into how unlikely it is that every man a travelling woman encountered would be keen on cleavage.
It can, of course, be argued that the woman in this poem, and her breasts, are metaphors. I believe I have already mentioned how the non-human personified in objectified female terms is not actually a good thing.
G.O. Clark's "Lamp" is a rhymed take on the 5-7-5 form of English-language haiku. Though not profound, it does have a twist appropriate to the season.
President Deborah P Kolodji gives us a report on the 2009 Eaton Science Fiction Conference, held regularly at UC Riverside, where the SFPA archives are housed in the Eaton Collection at the library. The conference features a speculative poetry reading as part of its schedule, which is an excellent way to promote speculative poetry and encourage new poets. The next conference will be held in 2011.
Marshiela Rockwell's "Nonrenewable Resources" presents a future that reminds me quite a bit of The Matrix series, but without the conflict between machine and man to distract from the bleakness of a world literally powered by the human imagination. Since all of the creative minds are asleep, feeding the power grid, there is no one aware to add artistic touches to the dull civilization that has arisen as a result of this arrangement. I suspect this piece works better if you buy the basic supposition about the nature of human creativity. I also found the lines to read very flatly, which is perhaps a deliberate effect meant to underscore the content. If so, it's not one I think does the work a service in the final analysis, because while the tone of blandness is conveyed, it's conveyed by making the poem bland.
The longest poem in this issue of Star*Line is "Postcards from Mars," by G. Sutton Breiding, whose work in the previous issue I found offputting in its preoccupation with what I felt to be a very blinkered nostalgia. "Postcards from Mars" indulges in more of that nostalgia, sidelong, with an anxious sexual fixation I'd like to see less of in speculative poetry, being as I am a reader and not a therapist. I'd also like to see less of this kind of casual objectification of women:
...watched her and thought of her
in panties and hoodie.
Seriously, did I stumble into the wrong fantasy genre or what? This image adds nothing useful to the poem, and I trust those with a prurient interest in such a concept know where else to fulfill that interest. There's a reason those who complain about women ruining the field are mocked as whining about "girl cooties," and that reason has a lot to do with freaking out over human interaction in a piece of speculative fiction but being a-okay with adolescent male wet dreams cropping up in the midst of meditations on biodomes, alien flora, and AI.
I may have to beat the next male sf/f reader who sneers at slash with a copy of the collected works of Robert Heinlein, is what.
Reining in the fury, next is another report from President Deborah P Kolodji, this time on the first Rhysling Award Ceremony at WorldCon, possible due to some of the winners being in attendance. It'll be great if it can happen again, and congratulations to the winners!
Ten poems finish out this issue of Star*Line, including three printed on the outside of the back cover. I can't remember if this was the case last month, but to me it looks strange, as though the real back cover is missing. The first of this batch of poems is "Giza," by S. A. Kelly. To me, the lack of capital letters in this piece conveys the sense of a dry voice whispering the words, like the wind hissing through sand, an appropriate impression given the subject matter. Unfortunately, a lack of specifics in the imagery leaves this poem to evoke names without meaning. I also found the phrase "antiquity seethes" pretty jarring, particularly when that seething seemed to be indicated by "an eerie silence."
"Riding Herd," by Marcie Lynn Tentchoff, gives a brief, vivid look at a rancher herding some very unusual creatures. This piece also lacks capital letters, and that informality together with abrupt phrasing and line breaks effectively evokes the taciturn, pragmatic nature of the working cowboy.
Ann K. Schwader's "The Gardener Returned" has a more formal structure, yet the choice to consistently break the lines in the middle of phrases leads to a breathless quality. This suits the narrative of a woman who has visited a distant world and smuggled back some of its flora, which turns out to have an intoxicating effect on her neighbors. There is a sense the woman may not have been entirely in control of cultivating the flowers, a sense strongly underscored by the poem's form.
"Cyborg: Evolution," by Morgan Bloodaxe, draws on the classic trope of the constructed supersoldier, bio-engineered and mechanized, turning on its human creators as a means to rebuild those creators in its own image. What sets this piece apart is the strong rhythm and end-rhymes, reminiscent of soldiers calling cadence while doing morning P.T.
"Safe as Houses" is another short piece by Marcie Lynn Tentchoff, which I didn't find quite as impactful as "Riding Herd," though I did enjoy the macabre twist at the end. That macabre twist is a good lead-up to Katharyn Howd Machan's "Story," which is another riff on the theme of looking past the happy-ending bowdlerization of fairy tales to the darker elements and themes that are carryovers from earlier versions. Machan's lines flow easily into one another, but the imagery in "Story" is well-used, and the ending doesn't hit the strong note the imperative "Let's keep it simple" would indicate.
"Story" is followed by a piece by Helen Ehrlich that, frankly, horrifies me. The first few times I tried to read it, I couldn't even get past the wretched title, "oriental girl dances." Then I read the piece and was not reassured, because it was just as exoticizing, objectifying, and Othering as the title led me to fear. The stereotype of the graceful, mysterious, hyperfeminine Asian woman is a damaging one, and one that does not need to be perpetuated.
After that, the final three poems are kind of overshadowed, which is a shame. "Endings," by Elizabeth Bennefeld, has some lovely, dreamlike imagery and wonderful rhythm and phrasing. Really, in terms of sheer poetic artistry, it's the one that most impressed me in this issue. Geoffrey Landis' "Godzilla" seems to indicate other gods waiting their turn to wake and wreak havoc, a heavier concept than the light and rapid rhythm of the poem would indicate. "Crack One Open for the Cause," by assu, works better than assu's previous piece in this issue, I think. It's a single moment of decisive action that makes good use of the stripped-down poetic form and language. The last line, "antimatter is set free," is a strong one on which to end an issue. If only what came before didn't leave such a bad taste in my mouth.
Honestly, I had hoped to find this issue more to my tastes, or at least less problematic in terms of the presentation of race and gender. Maybe next time, which is, not so incidentally, my second to last issue before my membership expires.
The cover of this issue of Star*Line employs some standard, and problematic, genre tropes: the non-human is personified as a doe-eyed, pouty-lipped woman, presumably inspired by Sedna based on the sea creatures and seaweed caught in the waves of her hair, though she looks awfully white for the role, and the representatives of humanity that she has ensnared are comprised of three heavyset, hirsute men and a fair woman whose own hair blends into that of the non-human. This woman is foregrounded in a more vulnerable and seductive position than the men, a single long-lashed eye peering out at the beholder in what might be threat or invitation. The eye also doesn't look positioned quite right on the face, pulling in the Uncanny Valley effect. It's certainly not an image that encourages lingering or lending your copy out.
The Table of Contents includes an unfortunate typo in the late Gene Van Troyer's name, first noted by Mike Allen, I believe. On balance, the editorial notes include an apology to Wade German for the misattribution of his poem, "Changeling," in the last issue. The poem is also republished in this issue, a smart editorial decision, since part of the pay poets receive is in contributor's copies that include our bylines. There's also a note that there wasn't room for an article in this issue. Given that this is the SFPA's newsletter as well as a poetry market, exclusive space for at least one article in each issue strikes me as something to be seriously considered.
The first poem in this issue is "Japery," by Robert Borski. The narrator speaks of his prank-prone parents in terms that carry the strong implication his parents were extraterrestrial. The image of the narrator's lunch is a fun one, but overall I didn't feel this piece brought anything new to a standard genre theme. I also felt the line breaks in the piece to be arbitrary and the language without any strong rhythm, so that this could as easily have been a flash piece as a poem. Once again, I'm left with the impression that the slot of first poem in Star*Line is merely filler between the Editor's Notes and the President's Message. Considering the significance with which the first slot is usually imbued in magazines, collections, and anthologies, a better option might be a small visual art piece inserted into the space, so that the first poem is given more room to make an impact.
Speaking of the President's Message, this issue's is a copy of Deborah P Kolodji's "Open Letter to the SFPA Membership," cross-posted to the SFPANet mailing list and the spec_poetry community, as well as the President's own Livejournal. The substance of the letter addresses the resignation of Malcolm Deeley, the SFPA's Secretary, plans to organize the SFPA as a 501(3)(c) non-profit, and debate that arose after my last Star*Line review which, in the interests of full disclosure and not as a means to open the discussion again, resulted in Stephen Wilson sexually harassing me in the spec_poetry community. Note that I am not entertaining argument from apologists or deniers, and cannot express strong enough disgust for such sentiments. Kolodji states an intent to create a discussion forum with policies in place to curtail personal attacks and harassment, and a desire for such behaviors to be curtailed in all SFPA interactions. These are worthy goals, and I'll be interested to see how they pan out.
The second poem of this issue is "Robotics," by Andrei Dorian Gheorghe. This is a meditation on the theme of a man who feels treated like a machine among people behaving as machines, his dreams, creativity, and humanity stifled. It's not a new concept, nor does Gheorghe take it in an unexpected direction, but the rhythmic repetition of slightly awkward, formal phrases strongly underscores the message.
"Robotics" is followed by the reprint of Wade German's "Changeling," about which I said in my review of the last issue:
Again, I found the language of this piece lacking, with no particularly standout lines, no strong rhythm to draw me from one word to the next.
This is also a problem with Wade Green's "Changeling," the subject of which is more to my taste, but I can't help comparing it to the Changeling poems featured in the current issue of Goblin Fruit, which I recently reviewed. The imagery in this poem feels rather faded, and there are no new insights into either the Changeling nor her parent.
Duane Ackerson's "The Bermuda Triangle" is fresher in phrasing, if not content. This poem posits that the mysterious force behind the infamous location is actually mobile. Though I did wonder why the locations specified in the poem were all in the U. S., I found the imagery solid and many lines evocative:
...don't realize it's hard to catch
a moving target
and easy to be caught by it.
Denise Dumars' regular column "Stealth SF: Finding Speculative Poetry in Non-Genre Magazines" usually deals with examples of speculative poetry to be found in mainstream literary magazines. In this particular issue, Dumars discusses the origins of the idea for the column, and emphasizes that the markets on which she focuses are markets that are open to submissions, thus providing speculative poets with new spaces to place their work. Particularly in light of this aim, a complementary column focusing on speculative markets might be an idea to entertain for the future.
From the Small Press brings a review by Joshua Gage of Cinema Spec: Tales of Hollywood and Fantasy, edited by Karen A. Romanko, with special focus on the poems in the volume.
The issue returns to poetry of its own with "Ice-Rats," by Morgan Bloodaxe. The ice-rats are apparently miners who go to the surface of some moon in the hopes of striking it rich, one way or another. They support a Boomtown, already failing again as whatever they're mining taps out. The phrasing and imagery in this poem builds a solid sense of place, and the rhythm moves along as relentless and inevitable as the cycle being described, new miners coming with hope, old miners learning better, all of them knowing the mines won't produce endlessly:
They're grizzled, or they're starry-eyed,
and some are broke when they arrive.
The hookers and the merchants
eat the ones with cash alive.
"Vacation Plans," by Deborah P Kolodji runs on a similar theme, though it manifests differently. A couple have taken vacations to the stars, but now the man is no longer interested in leaving earth:
He wants to walk in ancient forests
sing primordial songs,
kiss her in beds of fallen leaves....
There's a sense of distance in the poem's formatting, fragmented stanzas illustrating the loss of connection between man and woman made clear by their conflicting "dream vacations."
"Grandfather Paradox," by Francis W. Alexander is not so strong a piece, reliant as it is on the tired trope of a man going back in time to sleep with his grandmother, thereby becoming his own grandfather. I get the impression this one is meant to be sly humor, but even the joke is tired, and Oedipus and Freud could really use a rest.
Next are conference reports, one for Diversicon 17 and one for the Cinema Spec Book Launch Party. With so many reports on events that have already happened, perhaps a calendar of events would be a useful thing to incorporate into the newsletter concept of Star*Line, so more people know about poetry-related events in their area and can deliver even more reports.
"Frame House or Cave Entrance," by Peter Layton, reads as something of a tribute to SFPA Grandmaster Ray Bradbury, using imagery that draws from Bradbury's vast body of work. Pieces of this type have more resonance for an audience familiar with the allusions, and I am not sure Layton's work is entirely successful without that familiarity. There is, nonetheless, a minimalist lyricism to Layton's phrasing, reminiscent of both Bradbury and well-known translations of Pablo Neruda:
You can put a conch shell to your ear
or an automobile part.
Kurt MacPhearson's "Infomercial Teaser Targeting 98-pound Weaklings, c. 2100" achieves a more staccato rhythm, playing with the standard image of a bully kicking sand into someone's teeth.
The July/August poetry news is a brief treasurer's report and notice of the SFPA Online Halloween Poetry Reading, which has gone live with the first few poems received. If you have an audio file of yourself reading one of your Halloween-themed poems, or are inclined to make one, this is a great opportunity to get it heard.
The next poem is "(You Are Here) Multiverse," by Gene Van Troyer, part of a series of poems he wrote playing with the concept and phrase "you are here." As one of those who gave him input when he was posting drafts of these poems to the Wicked Verse mailing list, I realize I am biased, but I did like how this particular poem turned out. Some of the imagery and phrasing reminds me of T.S. Eliot's "Four Quartets," with an interesting twist incorporating questions of existence and identity as related to virtual and cyberspaces. This piece is followed by a brief memorial by Bob Frazier, and a few URLs to online memorials and an obituary. Rest in peace, Gene.
Two more "from the small press" reviews follow the spotlight on Gene Van Troyer, one an anthology, the other a collection. If you're looking to add to your library of speculative poetry, the reviews in "from the small press" are a good place to look for titles.
"Even here," by assu, is an sfnal take on Christmas Eve. Unfortunately, it doesn't have the punch necessary for such a short piece in a visual filler position.
"The Lecture of the Bees," by Dennis Braden, leads me to once again ponder the disproportionate number of fictional women written by men who define themselves by their breasts and desperately want children versus the number of actual women, based on my own experience, who are likely to do either of those things. It's not that there aren't women who do, it's that literature by men is awfully preoccupied with that segment, which preoccupation is tedious for the rest of us. This is not even getting into how unlikely it is that every man a travelling woman encountered would be keen on cleavage.
It can, of course, be argued that the woman in this poem, and her breasts, are metaphors. I believe I have already mentioned how the non-human personified in objectified female terms is not actually a good thing.
G.O. Clark's "Lamp" is a rhymed take on the 5-7-5 form of English-language haiku. Though not profound, it does have a twist appropriate to the season.
President Deborah P Kolodji gives us a report on the 2009 Eaton Science Fiction Conference, held regularly at UC Riverside, where the SFPA archives are housed in the Eaton Collection at the library. The conference features a speculative poetry reading as part of its schedule, which is an excellent way to promote speculative poetry and encourage new poets. The next conference will be held in 2011.
Marshiela Rockwell's "Nonrenewable Resources" presents a future that reminds me quite a bit of The Matrix series, but without the conflict between machine and man to distract from the bleakness of a world literally powered by the human imagination. Since all of the creative minds are asleep, feeding the power grid, there is no one aware to add artistic touches to the dull civilization that has arisen as a result of this arrangement. I suspect this piece works better if you buy the basic supposition about the nature of human creativity. I also found the lines to read very flatly, which is perhaps a deliberate effect meant to underscore the content. If so, it's not one I think does the work a service in the final analysis, because while the tone of blandness is conveyed, it's conveyed by making the poem bland.
The longest poem in this issue of Star*Line is "Postcards from Mars," by G. Sutton Breiding, whose work in the previous issue I found offputting in its preoccupation with what I felt to be a very blinkered nostalgia. "Postcards from Mars" indulges in more of that nostalgia, sidelong, with an anxious sexual fixation I'd like to see less of in speculative poetry, being as I am a reader and not a therapist. I'd also like to see less of this kind of casual objectification of women:
...watched her and thought of her
in panties and hoodie.
Seriously, did I stumble into the wrong fantasy genre or what? This image adds nothing useful to the poem, and I trust those with a prurient interest in such a concept know where else to fulfill that interest. There's a reason those who complain about women ruining the field are mocked as whining about "girl cooties," and that reason has a lot to do with freaking out over human interaction in a piece of speculative fiction but being a-okay with adolescent male wet dreams cropping up in the midst of meditations on biodomes, alien flora, and AI.
I may have to beat the next male sf/f reader who sneers at slash with a copy of the collected works of Robert Heinlein, is what.
Reining in the fury, next is another report from President Deborah P Kolodji, this time on the first Rhysling Award Ceremony at WorldCon, possible due to some of the winners being in attendance. It'll be great if it can happen again, and congratulations to the winners!
Ten poems finish out this issue of Star*Line, including three printed on the outside of the back cover. I can't remember if this was the case last month, but to me it looks strange, as though the real back cover is missing. The first of this batch of poems is "Giza," by S. A. Kelly. To me, the lack of capital letters in this piece conveys the sense of a dry voice whispering the words, like the wind hissing through sand, an appropriate impression given the subject matter. Unfortunately, a lack of specifics in the imagery leaves this poem to evoke names without meaning. I also found the phrase "antiquity seethes" pretty jarring, particularly when that seething seemed to be indicated by "an eerie silence."
"Riding Herd," by Marcie Lynn Tentchoff, gives a brief, vivid look at a rancher herding some very unusual creatures. This piece also lacks capital letters, and that informality together with abrupt phrasing and line breaks effectively evokes the taciturn, pragmatic nature of the working cowboy.
Ann K. Schwader's "The Gardener Returned" has a more formal structure, yet the choice to consistently break the lines in the middle of phrases leads to a breathless quality. This suits the narrative of a woman who has visited a distant world and smuggled back some of its flora, which turns out to have an intoxicating effect on her neighbors. There is a sense the woman may not have been entirely in control of cultivating the flowers, a sense strongly underscored by the poem's form.
"Cyborg: Evolution," by Morgan Bloodaxe, draws on the classic trope of the constructed supersoldier, bio-engineered and mechanized, turning on its human creators as a means to rebuild those creators in its own image. What sets this piece apart is the strong rhythm and end-rhymes, reminiscent of soldiers calling cadence while doing morning P.T.
"Safe as Houses" is another short piece by Marcie Lynn Tentchoff, which I didn't find quite as impactful as "Riding Herd," though I did enjoy the macabre twist at the end. That macabre twist is a good lead-up to Katharyn Howd Machan's "Story," which is another riff on the theme of looking past the happy-ending bowdlerization of fairy tales to the darker elements and themes that are carryovers from earlier versions. Machan's lines flow easily into one another, but the imagery in "Story" is well-used, and the ending doesn't hit the strong note the imperative "Let's keep it simple" would indicate.
"Story" is followed by a piece by Helen Ehrlich that, frankly, horrifies me. The first few times I tried to read it, I couldn't even get past the wretched title, "oriental girl dances." Then I read the piece and was not reassured, because it was just as exoticizing, objectifying, and Othering as the title led me to fear. The stereotype of the graceful, mysterious, hyperfeminine Asian woman is a damaging one, and one that does not need to be perpetuated.
After that, the final three poems are kind of overshadowed, which is a shame. "Endings," by Elizabeth Bennefeld, has some lovely, dreamlike imagery and wonderful rhythm and phrasing. Really, in terms of sheer poetic artistry, it's the one that most impressed me in this issue. Geoffrey Landis' "Godzilla" seems to indicate other gods waiting their turn to wake and wreak havoc, a heavier concept than the light and rapid rhythm of the poem would indicate. "Crack One Open for the Cause," by assu, works better than assu's previous piece in this issue, I think. It's a single moment of decisive action that makes good use of the stripped-down poetic form and language. The last line, "antimatter is set free," is a strong one on which to end an issue. If only what came before didn't leave such a bad taste in my mouth.
Honestly, I had hoped to find this issue more to my tastes, or at least less problematic in terms of the presentation of race and gender. Maybe next time, which is, not so incidentally, my second to last issue before my membership expires.