The poems are beautiful. The prose is beautiful. There’s a wonderful story about a girl who tells her boyfriend’s father, “Sometimes, when I’m walking alone at night, and the wind is strong at my back, blowing up from the ground, it gives me a little nudge, and I feel I could fly. If I were to start running in long bounding paces and the wind caught my back just right, I think I’d really take off.” The poems are beautiful: “She screams for most of the night/on the landing surrounded/by the thick bloodless scent of her/favourite tree./She screams through her fingers/ which twist her hair, her words and voice,/round round round/bobby pins to keep it all set/ like a hundred eyes pierced/like coiled snakes or sleeping babies.” This is a beautiful magazine. It’s beautiful without even trying — which I guess is what actually makes it beautiful. It isn’t glossy, like those other university mags. The layout is more like fallout. In “Baby Judy Finds a Puppy” the story seems to end at the bottom of one page, but then, if you look carefully, you see that the last sentence, the punch line, is at the top of the page…wait a minute, there’s no page numbers. Who made this magazine? Nobody can be this ingenuous…Just put out a magazine. Let the lines fall where ever they fall. Don’t number the pages. Put no price on the magazine. No address. The only disappointment is, when there’s another issue, if there’s another issue, I probably won’t be able to find it.
lit mag / no known publisher / main creators: Jen Chorus, Tony Bergamin, Robert Antenore (editors) / $? / University of Toronto