Shiny, I have decided, has to be the most aptly named publication currently going. It arrives, just like the Harvard Business Review, in a clear plastic envelope with a separate sheet containing the address & mailing information. With its oversized page & impeccable visual production – perfect binding, ample uses of white space, at least one art feature & even, dare I say, five pages of ads in the back – it’s as good a looking poetry periodical as we now have. Shiny wants to be taken seriously – and absolutely deserves it – but it has no interest, for example, in critique. I’m not aware that it has ever printed a review or a page of theory. Nor is it even an annual. There have been just five issues in the past twelve years.

I see Shiny less as a magazine you would be apt to see on campus than in an art gallery – it’s almost an art object itself. Perhaps because it has this sense of poetry as close kin to the visual arts, I tend to think of Shiny as being related, however obliquely, to the New York School, even to the detail of being edited in what I think of as the uppermost end of Manhattan, which is Boulder, Colorado. Number 13, freshly at the door, reflects this heritage – it includes a six-page John Ashbery poem, plus work by Bernadette Mayer, Ron Padgett, Paul Violi, Anne Waldman & Lewis Warsh. There are also pieces from younger writers who are not so terribly distant in sensibility: Reed Bye, Richard Roundy, Eleni Sikelianos, Chris Edgar, Michael Gizzi & David Trinidad. There is Geoff Young, whose life encompasses very much this same poetry/art world connection, tho not always from the same direction. This issue also has a healthy number of what I’m coming to think of as the Blogger generation of poets: Katie Dagentesh, Jordan Davis, Noah Eli Gordon, Michael Magee & Brian Kim Stefans. Yet there are also poets whom I think as langpo, or of as being quite close in spirit to that, starting with Rae Armantrout, right on page one, and including Leslie Scalapino, Alan Bernheimer (a diary of ten days in Paris), and Rod Smith. Plus lots of folks whom I would have to chalk up as pure independents, from Lydia Davis to Merrill Gilfillan to Cole Swenson to Kevin Killian or Ray Ragosta. Plus Mark DuCharme, Steve Dickison, Tim Davis (there’s that art world-poetry thing again), Barbara Henning, Emma Rossi, Max Blagg, Andrew Brucker (not the head shots of celebs for which he’s known, but six photos you won’t show to your grandmother) & Rikki Ducornet. As a total package, it’s remarkably coherent.

Shiny is available for $15 from P.O. Box 13125, Denver, CO 80201, or via SPD. DeBoers will see to it that it gets into more than a few magazine stands nationwide as well. Oddly enough, it does not have a website, perhaps to avoid confusion with the British fetish magazine by the same name. Email to shinymagazine@aol.com.