CENTRAL PARK functions as a window between worlds, a mysterious crossroads of perspective and creativity beyond the veil of the mainstream, but accessible enough to lure readers of purely main and knownstream mags. But one quick pass is like a cudgel to complacency. These are ideas hungry for change, openness, liberation of the contemporary mind, information assaulted into numbness. A fine example of this is Edward Jefferson's "The Shores of Artificial Lake", which consists of "interviews" with radical thinkers who move beyond the conventional parameters of debate and suggest genuine alternative ideas; guaranteed to induce a healthy attack of philosophical vertigo in those who suffer from what Bob Grumman calls "segraceptuality" in his article on mathematical poetry and its lack of acceptance by the aesthetic establishment. Powerful razor edge stories, poems, visuals and forms that defy category. The taboos are tossed to the wind, this is what free individualism looks like in print.--Jake Berry
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The highest production values and the thoroughest coverage in the otherstream: includes considered essays on culture and society by such writers as Susan Smith Nash and (editor) Stephen-Paul Martin; such kinds of texts as Eve Ensler's series of performance monologues, "The Vagina Monologues," and Jonathan Brannen's droll surrealistic short story, "The Happy Shirt"; and a wide variety of poems, visuals, and interviews.--Bob Grumman
This review originally appeared in TapRoot Reviews #5,
Contact the editor, luigi-bob drake, at Burning Press
Copyright Burning Press 1994, 1996.