Maggie Helwig, the editor of Crash, seems to have an overwhelming teenage urge to tell everybody about her favourite books and her favourite comics and her favourite tv shows (she likes Teletubies). Maybe next issue she’ll tell us her favourite colour and her favourite food. As for the stories and poems Helwig chooses to put into Crash, it feels as if a plethora of disparate images ran into each other by accident and decided, often for no obviously good reason, to stay together. Here and there throughout the mag a kind of beauty rises up out of the chaos: “…but it’s too late now what’s written it what’s done and I’m sure there’s nothing much that can be sorry about storms listening to frogs against the grain elevator mechanic solid like a salesman for plumbing sugar onto grate feeling nestled in there wondering did it magic music come from the spheres I was wide awake when I heard it but now I hear nothing…” (Greg Evason). Mary Hutchinson does a great comic about a girl hallucinating in a wheelchair. Liza Potvin does a long, second-person meditation on the desire to see “your” husband dead because it’s the only way you can experience “the luxury of solitude” and at the same time get the insurance money. Potvin’s story turns out to be a battle between Romance and the realities of being married with children. It’s hard to tell exactly, but I think at the end of the story, Romance somehow wins. Crash is definitely worth reading, although I wish Helwig would tone down the phoney la-de-da tone that gushes through the stuff she herself writes. (KS)
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