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Bosh Hubris No. 1, - Edited by Robert Holt and Mandy Elkins,
Three Legged Dog Press, 12916 Heritage Dr. No. 204, Plymouth, MI 48170. Subscription probably 10 bucks for a bunch of issues but you better write Holt and Elkins at: boshhubris@aol.com

     I remember sitting in a bar and looking out the window and seeing a spotted black and white three-legged dog getting porked by a four-legged brown dog. The three-legged dog had one of her front legs missing. I guess it doesn't matter what three legs a dog has if you are on the bottom. But what if a three-legged guy dog was the top dog and that dog had one only leg in the back? Well, then what? Would it matter or if you were in the bar looking out the window would you just open issue number one of Bosh Hubris? Well? Eventually you would open the magazine and in it you finds this great prose by master twister of the word Jack Balls! His prose in this issue is I SHOT HELEN VENDLER, which in and of itself - meaning the title - is enough to place Bosh Hubris up there on the alter. And then there is Don Winter's Strip Bar: Hamtamck. Having been in many, many bars in Hamtamck, well they were all poetry and so is this bar and poem. And let's mention the last poem in the issue, Alan Catlin's The Workingman's Friend. A clear observation about ugly men in bars, which is something that Catlin should know about cause he works as a bartender. Maybe he is bartending in the bar in which I am reading this mag. I wonder if Catlin knows that outside a three-legged dog is being porked? I don't know. I just keep reading the prose of Lyn Lifshin, the prose of Wanda Coleman, a poem by Hugh Fox. The list goes on and outside the four-legged dog just wont quit.

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Bender. - Volume 4, Issue 4. 2001-2202.
Editor Jeff Epley. Long Beech Station, PO Box 21261, Long Beech, Ca. 90801. $5.00

     Let the elephants break down the walls! Let the great Moby Dick smash the hull of the dull Pequad. Allow the zebras and the people waiting for the bus in the cold of February to eat hot fish frys served by old nuns. Allow the cans at the curb be filled with the money of the rich. Allow the car to always start and the dents to pop out as if the car were foam and let the foam on the top of your beer be thick and free. Let there be Bender number four, NO. 4! Numero FourO! Ah. Up through the dullness, well, let's start off by noting that the guts and heart and soul center section of this issue are a section by Ron Koertge's called On the Horn- READ his poem In the Dirty Book Store. Ah, the strange joys of dirty book stores. Ah, my lost youth. And let me quote Jeff Karl Butler's Beer Song:

pale
ale
sale

     And a great poem by Joan Jobe Smith, which from up on the go-go stage her insight into the rotting souls of young pinheaded guys in the bar slices in to what is essentially wrong with America. And another great one by Lyn Lifshen who cuts into the pale blue soul of AM with a morning without coffee blade. And it goes on with Gerald Locklin and Nathan Graziano and Robert L. Pernick and Mark Wisniewski. These are new forms of gods here. These gods refuse to die. Let the poetry of Bender magazine take the place of the spongy, diseased brain of Attorney General John Asscraft. Let the grass grow dewy on the palm of Christ. Let Bender magazine and Jeff Epley be the cure for lung cancer so we can all smoke until eternity. Let Bender magazine and Bender's editor Jeff Epley make money for this labor of love and the love that will drain all organs of sex and let them fill up fast again for another draining. Let Bender magazine and editor Jeff Epley ride dinosaurs to Australia and to India and on the graves of the great poets in a form of Stegosaurus homage, homage of powerful dinosaurs is Bender and Epley listening to Kenneth Rexroth and Kenneth Fearing and Kenneth Patchen and Charles Bukowski. Epley, out there, keep riding. Man, Christ, Jesus, he has made one fucking beautiful magazine.

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The Life of All Worlds - by Marc Widershien.
62pp. $10.00. Ibbetson Street Press in conjunction with Stone Soup Poets, Somerville, MA. ibbetsonstreet@go.com

     Once within the poetry of Marc Widershien's The Life of All Worlds, one is drawn, floats into the self and into the own-self's geography of memory and the cities of that place within that memory and in the heart. This poem in 21 parts is a key and once in the door of the self, the poetry of that terrain rises to be alive. I found my own portal within these lines:

A tuna fish sandwich exploded
as I squeezed it into the wax paper

     Ah, how I love wax paper. Widershien's poems are a lunch bag full of such particulars and treats and the streets of growing up and that past that is the present and allows to continue growth. I am happy that such poetry exists and that poets like Marc Widershien's allow such particulars to be part of our life. Hail to his imagination for his imagination allows us to enter ours. Poetry can do such things, make such magic.

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