Rejoice! Thanks to the tireless efforts and editorial bravado of U.S. Dhuga and Ben Mazer, the inaugural issue of The Battersea Review is up online (and soon to be available in print).
Contributors include:
Marjorie Perloff on Gertrude Stein, Picasso, and Duchamp!
Adam Kirsch
Nora Delaney on Philip Larkin!
Stephen Burt
Todd Swift on poetry of the 1940s!
Ben Mazer's long, adventurous poem "The King"!
Philip Nikolayev
Stephen Sturgeon
Gerard Malanga (the original bad boy of Andy Warhol's Factory)
Jeet Thayil
John Hennessy
Joe Green
Greg Delanty
M.A. Schorr
Kathleen Rooney
Mario Murgia
Ailbhe Darcy
Previously uncollected work by the late, great Weldon Kees!
Also... Robert Archambeau (a few poems of mine have found their way into the issue).
According to the opening editorial, "The erudite Robert Archambeau is struggling in the most positive sense between the polarities of modernism and post-modernism, with a firm eye on our times" — I can't speak to my alleged erudition, but I think Dhuga and Mazer nailed it about the struggle. Reading that sentence, I feel exposed in the same way I did when a critic wrote that my poems were haunted by a powerful father figure. It's something I'd never noticed, and then suddenly, unnervingly, saw to be true.
The Battersea Review has announced itself with a bang. This will be a journal to watch, people.
