Joshua Saul Beckman: At the News of your Death--Permeable Press, 47 Noe Street, #4, San Francisco CA 94114-1017. 36 pp., $3. Three poems including a simple-worded free verse elegy in 9 stanzas, each moving from "At the news of your death" to various surrealities (e.g., a giant wave that "sat his big gray body down/ next to the few people left/ who hadn't run away in fear"; phone company computers' going on strike and being replaced by people; certain trees' deciding to drop their leaves annually in spring till the deceased returns) that slowly build a quite affecting mood. Also a poem gently against explaining "everything in poetry"--or relationships--with a footnote recommending standing "close with each hand on the other's arms," moving "them up and down in a warming motion" while repeating 'It is heavy-handed' and 'It is unfair.'" O!!ZONE (#16, Spring 1995), 1266 Fountain View Dr., Houston TX 7057. 60 pp., $5. Some s-m-tinged representational fotos by Marc Fily of France of partially-dressed prostitutes provide this issue's sharpest jut--except for a multi-representational collage by Guy Beining I wish had been reproduced larger that features a Vietnamese (I think) prostitute (I think). Of the texts a stand- out is Glenn Russell's surrealistic prose short, "The Dark Elf," concerning a mirror that really gives mirror-images--of dicklessness as an erection, for instance. The poetry is generally well-crafted and conventional, and not usually too memorable--though Charles H. Webb slams that standard post- Vietnam life of the average American male in "How Much Money Would It Take" with seering memorability. bg LOST & FOUND TIMES (#37, November 1996), Luna Bisonte Prods, 137 Leland Ave., Columbus OH 43214. 56 pp., $6. Ackerman's in prime form here as "Ralph '$50,000 Party' Delgado" reporting on Ackerman's first meeting with John M. Bennett, an ambulance driver who steals his patients' clothes, then sells them back to them at his house while spouting lines like, "Christ, you river rubes make me think of napkins milking stains to sneeze a thought twat at master slurping . . ." Contraesthetically, the issue boasts numerous Jim Leftwich poems, including a set of textual super-imposings that starts with "bosos" on top of itself in such a way as to suggest "bios," "bosom" and "blossoms." No room to say more about this always alarmingly-off-both-ends-of-the- absurdity/sublimity-continuum circus of a zine. bg Patrick Mullins: PATRICK MULLINS REVISES JOHN M. BENNETT--231 Elizabeth Street, Athens GA 30601. 4 cards, $1. Each card contains a single line comprised of two or more lines from Bennett (one of them upside-down, and several fading). Our tracks through existence? Life as obliterations? I'm afraid I can't make out enough words to be more specific. There's something worthwhile going on here, though. bg Edmund Conti and Wayne Hogan: EB & FLO, A WRITER'S MANUAL--Box 842, Cookeville TN 38503 or 79 Tulip Street, Summit NJ 07901. 52 pp., $6. Light verse and illustrations. Samples: "Work hard,/ writer, and ye shall be/ reworded," by Hogan (in his "Ode to The Editor's Credo"); "If it's irony/ eventually/ it will be rusty," by Conti, from "Oxidation." Lots of amusement here, especially for all us wannabe bigtime writers. bg Patrick Mullins: SLEEP--231 Elizabeth Street, Athens GA 30601. 8 pp., $1. A utilitarian epigraph: "We must work hard in order to sleep better, deeper and more dreamlessly" precedes six illu- scriptions (i.e., unfused mixtures of pictures and texts) that in a decidedly un-utilitarian fashion break modern technology, pictured here by objects like a telescope, a movie projector, telephone poles, a watch, and abstract texts such as reference presupposes existence" into fragments of sleep, not dreamless. bg  2 SEMIAUTOMATIC (#4, Winter 1996), 231 Elizabeth Street, Athens GA 30601. 16 pp., $2 (cash only). A perfect one-sitting revue of prime burstnorm poetry, mostly pluraesthetic as with Bay Kelley's smeary, carbon-miscopied, mistyped short texts, one funereally sad about "a festive box," another shatteringly capturing the desolation of c(old); and some great textual illumages (visual artworks made up of letters empty of semantic content) by Avelino de Araujo. But Bennett and Murphy have text-only poems here, too, for the segreceptual. (Murphy's "klept emotion" especially yowwed me, putting me in some department store of shoplifted emotion). bg SHIT DIARY (#18, August 1996), Box 3621, Port Charlotte FL 33949. 40 pp., $1. Lots of the usual gross, sadistic, weird stuff this zine is renowned for. Willie Smith is featured with a tale of a screwed-up adolescent, or just post-adolescent male who seems to get his main charge in life from Stalingrad corpses in a documentary he watches over and over. Also an interesting interview of 6HZ editors Sean Winchester and Chris Anderson, 23 zine reviews, 6 music reviews, a great list of real words sure to be useful to Shit Diary readers like "obstipation" (extreme constipation) and "spintry" (male prostitute) with examples of use like "My dad brained a spintry with an Electrolux while vacationing in San Antonio," and scads else. bg POETRY USA (#27, Summer 1996), Fort Mason Center, Building D, San Francisco CA 94123. 32 pp., $3. A long-running, packed poetry- tabloid back after a long absence with Jack Foley no longer editing it and, apparently, no longer cutting-edge. This issue is devoted almost entirely to orthotechnical "Poems of Protest," some of them agit-propically bad, like Kush's full-page "The Song of Capitalism," the stanzas of which repeat the title, then fire off salvoes of repeated words or word-groups like "FIRED FIRED FIRED" or "scared scared anxious tense tense tense tense . . ." But there's good stuff here, too, like the poem by Sharon Dubiago about coming to terms with the hatred of her lover's ex. bg SILENT BUT DEADLY (#9, July 1996), Box 3621, Port Charlotte FL 33949. 28 pp., $1. Happily, not only is this uninhibited poetry workshop zine back after a long snooze, but further issues are promised. The poems up for review this time are by Richard King Perkins II, Mary Winters, Gabe Neruda, Eel Leonard (with a hilarious effort most reviewers mistook as serious) and Pat McKinnon. The usual wide range of reviewing--and extra- curricular insults (C. Mulrooney, for instance, congratulates me "for knowing when (I am) being insulted, at last" but reviews no poems, none of them being worth reviewing, in his view. But how can any poem not be worth reviewing? bg  3 NEW ORLEANS REVIEW (Vol. 22, No. 1, Spring 1996), Loyola University, New Orleans LA 70118. 128 pp., $6. Jack Foley and Ron Silliman represent burstnorm literature this issue, the latter with prose that begins, "Confused, ants huddle about the box of chocolates for warmth. In an open cauldron (my skull), syntax simmers. Query this." Syntax as chocolate? Foley's piece is all semi-gnostic accumulatively rich injunctions to "describe/"--for example, "describe/ the body is slow/ the mind is slow BUT THE MOUTH". There's much else of value here such as William T. Cotton's laudatory study of Helen Vendler's critical practice that seems mostly valid but fails to address her disregard for all poetry using techniques later than Pound's and Eliot's (unless you count Jorie Graham's "experiments" with line- length). bg NEW ORLEANS REVIEW (Vol. 22, No. 2, Summer 1996), Loyola University, New Orleans LA 70118. 110 pp., $6. This issue is devoted almost entirely to recent British Poetry, most of it pretty standardly Iowa-School free verse, with dollops of langpo. Outside the British section is a surprisingly old-fashioned story by Kyle Jarrard about three grubby old men, one of whom claims to be God, then withdraws the claim--but really is God . . . maybe. bg Henry George Fischer: MORE TIMELY RHYMES FROM THE SHERMAN SENTINEL--The Sentinel, Box 64, Sherman CT 06784. 68 pp., $6.59. I agree with blurber X. J. Kennedy who calls Fischer "one of the deftest living practitioners of the much-maligned form of light verse. How can one otherwise describe a man who, in a poem about puns (and, groan, is called "Once A Pun A Time"), claims that "A rebus pun/ Was prized so much an-/ oble put one/ On his escutcheon?" bg  4 Harry Polkinhorn: MOUNT SOLEDAD--Left Hand Books, Station Hill Road, Barrytown NY 12507. 100 pp., $9. An autobiographical prose-collage about a failed affair that requires a lot of effort from the reader, for it's all paragraph-long, minimally- punctuated sentences that--well, here's a random sample: ". . . a windswept zone where yellowing documentation springs a hard-on foolish with youthful hopes when you know full well your children need you sacrificial plants . . ." Absorbing material once you get into it, first as a hate-poem shrapneled with love; then as a portrait of (chiefly) woman-as-love-object/ woman-as-glazedly- obsessed-marketeer, and of the world as a system of endless, petty money-flow; and, finally, as a love-poem shrapneled with hate--to put it all very tentatively as this is a book to be read multiple times, and I've only had time to go through it once. bg HOUSE ORGAN--(#16, Fall 1996), Kenneth Warren, 1250 Belle Ave., Lakewood OH 44107. 24 pp., cost: SASE. One of the few regular litzines around. This issue features a charged take on the paintings of Francis Bacon whose "screaming mouths/ are mute, frozen,/ blocked tunnels./ not-orifices./ they appear/ without heads./ As if the body is/ a toothed sewer/ that can manifest/ in any of/ its members.// or mouth as/ manhole,/ without cover." Also criticism about, and a poem for, Bob Kaufman, by, respectively, Kenneth Warren and A.D. Winans. A stand-out discussion of Robert Duncan by Dennis Formento, too. Much else. bg HOUSE ORGAN--(#8, Fall 1994), Kenneth Warren, 1250 Belle Ave., Lakewood OH 44107. 20 pp., cost: SASE. I continue to admire this publication for including long serious takes on poets, expecially contemporaries, like one here by Kenneth Warren on Hugh Seidman-- after, and with, samples of Seidman's work, such as "Composition: T Rex": finally unearthed dwarfing men 65 million years up/downwind A second essay, by Robert Yagley, cogently tries to persuade me Emily Dickinson's love poetry was not as cloistered as her life, and fails to. Many fine poems are also here, like Joe Napora's easy-to-quote "sore eros": "tOUCH." Plus a moving short story by Robert Buckeye about a last visit, with his father, to his uncle.zbg  5 John Byrum: ORANGE--Generator Press, 3203 West 14th Street, #13, Cleveland OH 44109. 28 pp., $2. One of Byrum's minimalist white- letters-on-black poems. Minute changes in typography, or letters' size, or number of lines per page, or where words or lines end take on huge expressive value as they carry us weightlessly or stop us dramatically in the amazing full glow of thought between "or/ an/ ge" and "pla/ ceh/ old/ ers," the texts on Byrum's front and back covers. Here's an excerpt from one of the inner texts: "signshoulderfortheun/ cannyhasbeenitwhichsho/ uldtheasityouareofrecei/ vingweandifgrammar . . ." bg REPORT TO HELL (#8, January/February 1995), Marrat Press, Box 44089, Calabash NC 28467. 60 pp., $1.50. A zine crammed with poems, short stories and illustrations at all levels of effectiveness, plus micro-reviews of 19 other zines, only one of which was not new to me. Orthotechnical poetry predominates but there's surrealism and dada present, as well. Main virtue: giving so many voices, several if them obscureeven by otherstream standards, a place to be heard; main vice: burying work by people like John Grey, Duane Locke and Robert Howington (with 3 especially funny poem s for the sexually-needy older male) under occasinally very jejune work. bg TOMORROW MAGAZINE (#15, Winter 1996), Contemporary Arts Publishing, Box 148486, Chicago IL 60614. 34 pp., $5. A spiffily-produced litzine out of Chicago that is now fifteen- years-old. Its writing doesn't seem very tomorrow to me, but some of it is quite good, including the modern-lingoed, O-Henry- structured "Kreskin Be Damned," a dramatic monologue by Jamie Pachino, and a Barbie poem by Lyn Lifshin. Oberc has some nifty white-ink, high-action figure-distortions scattered through the issue, too. bg (Note: tomorrow Magazine's web address is http://www.tezcat.com/~audrelv/) XIB (#7, Summer 1995), XIB Publications, Box 262112, San Diego CA 92126. 64 pp., $5. One of my correspondents sez I and Mike Basinski should just call the main kind of poetry in this and similar publications "white trash poetry" instead of looking for a name that'll get academics to take it seriously and maybe he's right. Whatever it is, solid samples of it are here, classed up (or down) by a poem by Bennett that starts, "No but's drunk in the after-exhalation, altared . . ." And much here flows in loftier regions, though not Todd Moore's effort on his grandmother's teaching him how to spit. bg  6 THE PLASTIC TOWER (#24, January 1996), Box 702, Bowie MD 20718. 48 pp., $2.50. A few dozen orthotechnical poems, the majority of them about quotidian subjects like working in a Ford factory (Kent Braithwaite), Ronnie somebody and Ollie somebody (Peter Layton), female self-cosmeticization (Janet Kuypers) . . . Lots of common sense, common empathy (or its comically-black opposite, as in Curt Porter's multi-murder-from-the-murderer's-POV poem, "Let Them Drink Vodka") and common morality; little aesthetic stretch (though Michael Szekaly pays a wryly typographically- unconventional tribute to Miro) or new-angledness into society or existence. Reviews as well, including a particularly thoughtful one by Gabe Neruda of a mainstream bio of Lawrence. bg LEXICAL OBELISK--Jesse Glass, ECD, Fukuoka J. Gakuin College, 2409-1 Ogori, Ogori-shi, Fukuoka-Ken, 838-01, Japan. 70 pp., $8. In his introduction to this 1990 book, Robert Peters tabs Glass "a son of Lautreamont, Blake, and Whitman"; to that I add the Keats of "Lamia." Lots of otherworldly grotesquerie here, always in workmanlike (or better) free verse. "Gnosis M" seems characteristic. "The female won't nurse those that can't pass/ her postpartum nuzzle. She counts nascent/ eyes, legs,// & will not pop the birth bags of the odd ones/ with her teeth," it begins, then whispers of hideous mutants waiting in wombs for "a man's wrong move/ to unlock (them)," following that with a story of a forlornly-squealing six-legged kitten drowned as a monster by the protagonist's mother.

TINFISH (#3, Spring 1996), Susan M. Schultz, 1422A Dominis Street, Honolulu HA 96822.54 pp., $5. A Pacific Rim litzine with an emphasis on Hawaiian poets that is pretty ethno-regionalist in parts but not narrowly, narrowingly, so, witness Malia Pangilinan's artistically-courageous silly/sublime exploration of subjects like "poLIGHTness," which ends in a Beining-like schematic of a bookcase/cabinet combination, and Editor Schultze's caustic satire on the travel agencies' image of Hawaii, "We Try Harder." There's a good poem by Australian John Kinsella here, too, followed later by a deft short critical discussion of Kinsella by Mark Wallace. Capping the issue is another excerpt from Ron Silliman's more and more lyrical-seeming jump-cut masterpiece-in-progress, Alphabet. (Note: Tinfish is on the web at http://wings.buffalo.edu/epc/journals/Tinfish) bg Tim W. Brown: FIFTY DOLLAR DIARY--Box 148486, Chicago IL 60614. 10 pp., SASE. Interesting pamphlet subtitled "How I Attempted To Collect Money Owed Me For Writing, With Observations On The Current State Of Publishing, Universities, Class Relations, &tc." that relates Tim Brown's trials and tribulations going after $50 American Book Review owed him, and worrying about being blacklisted for not instead accepting (as I now have three times) a subscription extension. Who knows who was right here, harried, sometimes confused, editors trying to keep a serious (and thus money-losing) review going, or the idealistic Brown, representing the Severely Underpaid Nonacademic Writers who write for such publications (without the secondary payment in tenure credits that academics get from such work). bg MEAT EPOCH (#19, March 1996), 72 Orange Street, Apt. 5B, Brooklyn Heights NY 11202-6818. 8 pp., $5. This issue begins with a retelling of the Ern Malley affair, with interesting commentary, by Jack Foley--Ern being the dead surrealist poet two Australians concocted 50 years or so ago to satirize surrealistic poetry. Occasional passagesof his generally lousy verse such as "I am still/ The black swan of trespass on alien waters" made him a better poet than either of his creators. ME has some probing criticism by Editor Gregory St. Thomasino, too, principally of Irving Weiss's Visual Voices and Juxta, #2. A super-jumble by Thomas Love Taylor more accessible than I've previously read him (perhaps because it's about "the heart's start" toward a woman), a full-color Warholian treatment of a Warhol Marilyn by St. Thomasino, and a bunch of fine poems by people like Kempton, Ganick, Murphy and Berry round out the issue. bg  8 Michael Basinski: BARSTOKAI--Meow Press, 151 Park, Buffalo NY 14201. 22 pp., $3. A beautiful little booklet of infra-verbal texts that seem mere automatic writing but are short enough to find the (poetic) logic of. Take, for instance, the very first strophe. There "ice" (after "Malpractice") gives its "c" to "caVka," which is followed by "Vern" to make "cavern"; "Vern" mutates to "Vesmus" to "(venusK," (odors--like musk--always important to Basinski), then after several other musicks to "VvenoIs OL iceveliger," and with "s OL ice" we're simultaneously into Sol and back to ice, with also a return to (Venus's) "soliquids," a word appearing between "(venusK" and "VvenoIs." And from there we move into human beings', life's, and the universe's reproductive cycles with a lyric intensity equaled by almost no other current poet I know.

COMPOUND EYE--(#12, June 1996), 52 Park St., #3, Somerville MA 02143. 12 pp., $7/6 issues. 100-Word Reviews of collections of and books about langpo and related poetries, 22 of them. They are not what you'd call very critically incisive, with hardly a half dozen samples of their poets' work. But it's nice to hear from Gerald Burns about Ralph Maud's extremely thorough study of Charles Olson's reading, and from Editor Ange Mlinko about a 1963 Black Sparrow book by Jackson MacLow called 22 Light Poems. And get various other writers' impressions of people like William Bronk, Ron Silliman, Hannah Weiner and several other lesser known figures. bg TRANSMOG (#20, June 1996), Ficus strangulensis, Rt 6 Box 138, Charleston WV 25311. 27 pp., cost: SASE. Overwhelming onslaught of otherstream visual, textual and verbo-visual matter from 72 contributors. To get some small idea of its range, one need just turn to page seven's "AhaeTtullaFfa/ ssscrolatAAA" from Michael Basinski's "A" versus "My shirts have changed places./ I wonder why they don't disturb my pants," from Anthony Herles's "The Skeletons." Or, on page 21, Sparrow's "Today I crossed the street/ to see a dog bark" versus a collage by J. Lehmus in one half of which a photograph of an ornate tombstone mismarries a cut-out fragment of text, "ot the corn/ led and in b/ a hidden/ sleep/ seen it? h/ one light." bg