I like ink. It’s a good magazine. You can tell it’s a labour of love. The pieces are mostly short. Mostly poems, or stories where language matters. Everything feels like it’s carefully picked out, like only the best will do. And the work truly is good work. It moves in unexpected ways. Lea Littlewolfe does a poem that starts off talking about the heat in saskatoon and winds up with the narrator by the window, wrapped in a bed sheet, howling at the coyotes. Esther Mazakian strings together some lovely sentences: “Again, she said, Again I”ll explain why with fifty years of education between us we’re unable to hold down jobs. It’s only one night, he said expectantly, We’ll go, we’ll eat, we’ll leave. She shrugged. They sat for nearly twenty minutes as the rest of the news blared and the cat manufactured a dustball into a real rat.” Dave Sidjak has three real pretty poems: “It’s good to remember/that green things go on growing/at almost the same rate./Sure, in spring there’s a fluorescence/and in August, a drought,/but at night I’m sure/I hear them breathing and sighing.” I have only one nit to pick with ink. What’s with the reviews? Why does every lit mag and its mother have to have reviews? Jesus, look at Broken Pencil, it’s almost nothing but reviews. Well at least we review stuff that wouldn’t otherwise get reviewed. But ink – what does ink choose to review when it adds another review to a world where there’s probably more reviews born a day then there are cockroaches? Do they choose someone who needs and deserves the exposure, someone who’s published on one of the little presses, someone we ink readers may not have heard of, but would love to read? No, they choose Ann-Marie MacDonald. They choose Fall On Your Knees. They choose Knopf. I don’t get it.
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