Some excellent poems from the language-poetry school, and various hard-to-categorize prose texts. Also, critical attention to figures like Gertrude Stein, Paul Celan and William Burroughs. Well worth a scan, too, is editor Susan Smith Nash's "interview" (2 short questions followed by page-length answers) of Gerald Burns.--Bob Grumman
A rich and cleanly presented collection of poetry, visuals, prose texts, brief essays, and reviews. The selection is a generous cross-section of innovative writing, and thingking about same, in the general area of "post-Language" poetics and parallel trends. Many of the pieces in this issue revolve around the theme of History, an appropriate topic for this journal, which exhibits a great sensitivity to the development/evolution of non-mainstream writing, seeing it, in its essays and selections, in a deeper context than other publications which focus more on the present. This journal is one of the best in its field in the quality and contextualization of its selections, and contains work by some 50 writers, including Ficus Strangulenses and Colleen Lookingbill, Spencer Selby and Gerald Burns, Crag Hill and Thomas Lowe Taylor, and Mark DuCharme and Sheila E. Murphy. If one were to choose the 2 or 3 top reviews in this field, this would be one of them.--John M. Bennett
This review originally appeared in TapRoot Reviews #5,
Contact the editor, luigi-bob drake, at Burning Press
Copyright Burning Press 1994, 1996.