New poetry by Nathaniel Mackey! Mark Scroggins (who else?) on Adorno and model soldiers! A story by Magdalena Zurawaski! And much, much more—including my own modest contribution, a review of seven Romantic poets in seven lines, the first in a Lute & Drum series called "Seven Things." It's a fine new journal with a very slick design, and you can find it all here.
Here's a description of the contents from J. Peter Moore's editorial introduction:
This specter of aesthetic sociality emerges in Magdalena Zurawski’s “The Lamb,” when the professor protagonist realizes that literary meaning, like veterinary obstetrics, depends upon an a community of attentive midwives. Similarly in Edric Mesmer’s sequence from Strawberry Island, exilic regionalism undermines individual property rights: “local axiom—no one ever really owns an umbrella.” In our first installment of Moonlighting, a recurring feature that focuses on writers’ para-literary avocations, Mark Scroggins takes us through the anti-social exercise of raising an army in one’s basement, as he discusses his long-time obsessive-compulsive affair with model soldiers. In our other recurring segment, First Thought/Seven Things (a list of one-sentence reviews addressing a single topic) Robert Archambeau gives us the bathroom graffiti guide to Romantic Poetry.
Rounding out the issue, Ben Lee’s review of The Feel Trio mines the gentle ferocity of Fred Moten’s poetic insistence (after Édouard Glissant) that diasporic metaphysics begin with the “consent to not be a single being.” And finally, in murmuring tones of awakened consciousness Nathaniel Mackey returns us to those verdant boughs of sugar maple: “So it was green loomed out my window.” In his “Said to Have Been Heard to Say Hush,” we find perhaps the clearest annunciation of that lost past that pervades present day Riddle, that “Remembered moment lamenting / its exit.” In Mackey’s hand, the indestructible city, the little city of Lute & Drum, becomes an upper room where music plays on in our absence.
