I Always Forget to Check My Bewitjanus Email

The truth is it makes me sad to sign into that one since that's where my beloved aunt used to write me.

Since she died I feel like such a child under death's shadow when I visit that email. And miss her vicarious optimism for me, though I always naysayed it when she was alive. You know how aunts are. That strange wonderful slant relationship they have to you as a child. Oblique auntie love.

Well, I found some Goodreads friend invites from interesting authors and I found an invitation to view some wonderful new paintings by Barry Smylie, panoramic views of one of my favorite parts of the country. (Why do these strike me as Fairfield Porter meets ukiyo-e? two of my favorites!) And just now I found editor's Jonathan Minton's link to issue 19 of Word for Word poetry mag.

There's a ridiculous amount of great poetry in this current issue.

The mag's design aesthetic is sharp and simple.

I love Brian Strang's dinosaur sculpture cover art.

I think this issue is Best American Poetry caliber in numerous places. I mean, of course, when the BAP is having a good year. We've all seen those years where it seems to have been suffering from a poetry migraine and mistakenly tried to socialize even though clearly unfit for company.

Here are a few writers/artists whose work I really liked or loved, selected at random.

Annah Browning's pieces remind me simultaneously of Lucille Clifton (a poet much maligned and underestimated) when that poet wrote along spiritual themes in her iconoclastic, rather Blakean way. But Browning reminds me even more of the masterfully nuanced poetry of Carl Phillips (I loved The Tether) whose plique-a-jour poems remind me of Giacommetti's sculpture, particularly pieces like The Palace at 4 a.m. Physical forms are sketchy in their atoms and sculpture like G.'s and poems like Browning's acknowledge that.

Cindy St. John's poem titled after the meme "Shit Just Got Real" made me think of one too many horripilating murders I've seen detailed on Investigation Discovery. Scarily well-done.

Joshua Kryah's anaphoric poem "Holy Ghost People" is not short on stiletto lines. Some of the lines that shivved me: "Because absence is the end of wanting" and "Because you are suddener than most." It's a love poem undershot with mortality--if you hadn't already guessed by the tenor of those lines.

Shira Dentz has some very affecting poems which seem to be designed almost as necklaces or rosaries of haiku. Very plangent imagery and candor in her poetry. Like blood thumbprints.

Kristina Marie Darling's "Footnotes" poems (composed of just that) are amusing and evocative. They end up coming across as little experimental films characterized by deliciously madding jumpcuts. Yes, I know other poets have worked in this form before, but the poet's sensibility is different so the effects are different.

Gautman Verma's gorge field poem reminds me of Albiach. Very nuanced, with the interstices and open spaces rich with activity. Very neuronal in form. A poetry of ghost engrams.

Emileigh Barnes translates poetry into science and then back again in her reflections on the mathematics of natural forms, in her wonderful love poem cast in binary form, and other such treats.

Moriah Purdy's typographical layerings consist mostly of the shortest words in the English language (which do the most work) lain atop one another in very visually appealing and grammatically suggestive ways. Much negative capability to these and this vizpo work is, frankly, luscious. One of my favorites in the issue for sure. It manages to feel like a throwback to visual poetry of yesteryear (reminds me of a lot of concrete poetry of the sixties in a good way) and very 2012 at the same time.

Ark Codex's work: Gorgeous palimpsests. Very Peto. I want them on my walls.

It's scary how good Rachel May's The Vermont Studio Center Experiments" is. The fabric compositions mix primitivism and contempo slyness and their brilliant color juxtapositions titillate the retina, and the prose poems rise to match the visual complexity with their linguistic craftiness and emotional mojo. Or are these short fiction? In any case, they're as great as Russell Edson at his best. And most are about that heartbreaking.

Brian Strang's suite of drawings (dinosaur bones being somewhat histrionic!) make one wonder about the fine line between the comic and the tragic. They seem to hint at a terror beyond death. So, in a sense, they sort of incarnate the feeling of a panic attack. But with a humorous brio. I suppose they're capriccios.

Brian Lucas's trippy art is stone-cold foxes of psychedelia (psychedelica?). Some of the designs move towards mandalas and several pieces remind me of some of my favorite early twentieth-century Russian artists. It's halfway between those Russian mystics of the earth 20th century Russian avant-garde and Kenny Scharf. There's one that's a sort of blue uterine form that's totally Frankenthaler gorgeous. And another one which looks like a galatic stream of Klimt vignette enlarged via jpeg. Stunners.

Mike Sikkema's verbo-visual pieces are well-done but the first (topmost) piece is by far the best for me. I love how the two poems in this piece (the same, I believe) are top-to-bottom and bottom-to-top. They're like two lovers perversely lying with their heads at different ends of the bed but overlapping--maybe scissoring their legs. The images that he has laid the text over here are perfect for the text. There are two polar objects and a disconnect of rusted wire mesh between them. It doesn't connect the poles. Hard not to read this as a verbovisual relationship poem. It sort of strikes me as a steampunk updating of one of Chagall's paintings of lovers.

I didn't get a chance to read the reviews yet, but there are some books I want to read reviewed there, including one by Charles Bernstein.

This is just a stellar issue.