2: Love
Pictures by Olexander Wlasenko, poems by Sean Rasmussen and a story by Paul Hong. This lime green book is short on content, but tall on quality. The first few poems by Rasmussen are astonishingly confident, simple, unelaborated, unexplained moments: “some gardeners prefer//to break their space up with/trellis and vine/so that from any angle/you are trapped in a maze/anticipating the next corner/walking through such a garden/is an exploration of subtlety, not vista”. No overly_contrived vistas in these poems, just subtle anticipation as you round the next corner to another simple, but lovely moment. Paul Hong’s single story, “An Ordinary Tale”, is studded with unexplained moments that shadow a seemingly straight_forward storyline. Protagonist Ernie hops on a passing elephant to escape the mob __ but it’s never made clear where Ernie is, what the mob are doing there, or why an elephant is passing by). Ernie winds up in Camelot. As the story progresses, it becomes more and more surreal, but it maintains the surface semblance of normal, straight forward narrative. It remains delightfully unclear what exactly is going on and who is doing exactly what to whom. The story ends on a hilarious non_sequitur. There are also two pictures in this chapbook by someone named Wlasenko. These pictures are interesting enough, but seem out of place, tacked on. Maybe that’s the intention, since one is wrapped around the cover like an afterthought and the other is tucked inside, also like an afterthought. Or maybe they really were afterthoughts. (KS)