Like the Malahat Review, Descant, & The New Quarterly, Event is one of those intergalactic-imperial glossy litmags with a powerful roster of both new and established writers. But what is it about University-spawned journals which allow for directory-style presentation? I guess it gets the contents read. Nicely divvied up into poetry and fiction, this issue boast a Grant Buday story. It’s about Dung cakes, but man it’s rich. Barry Ballard’s poem Backing Up is precision poetry at its finest: “I’m trying to heal myself with magnets, fry the migraines into blank Reason, excise the smell of gasoline with hard sex blind enough to keep me reading Braille’d lines…” I like the first bit of Sue Ann Anldeson’s Love Poem With Barnacles: “the tide is out: we have to walk through starfish beyond a small, dead octopus before we can hear it…” With over 128 pages of this kind of writing, Event maintains its place among the top literary specimens in Canada. However, like all of these phone book style litmags, there is need for some relaxation. Zines have the ability to invite and sustain us into a realm of disbelief. The seriousness of this litmag’s writing, gorgeous or not, sometimes makes the writers seem like schoolyard show-offs. Buy this if you want to read good writing. (NGM)
lit journal, $7, Volume 29, #2, Calvin Wharton (Ed.) Douglas College. P.O. Box 2503, New Westminster, BC, V3L 5B2