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Have Fun Pretending by Alex Hampshire

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  Have Fun Pretending is made up of 120 untitled poems, each very tightly justified to the left margin and vertically centered. Though they have line breaks, they read more like a nonstop droll of speech whose effect is accretive and reverberant, at times sounding a bit like Stein’s Stanzas in Meditation : Do good things with bad money do bad things without money. Become a bad person for free without money, as things become free for everyone who acts now. All free things become bad things. All things become bad, too, because whether a bad person or a good one. No one is free while others are obsessed. No one is without the possibility of becoming capable. Lines like these and “nothing ever happens where no one ever profits / except when authorities are aware of the circumstances” speak to Hampshire’s antipathy towards mass-produced political discourse, his sense that good deeds have always already been bought by bad money and repurposed as virtuous marketing schemes. Indeed, much ...
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From the Pocket of Agent Dickinson by Zack Darsee & Elise Houcek

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On the first page of From the Pocket of Agent Dickinson , the “speaker” (Flangan) asks: “Was anything true, in fact?” This question speaks to Flanagan’s existential state as he proceeds to enter some form of a trip that, on my reading, lasts essentially until the fifty-third page (only to begin again, or re-intensify several pages later).   This question also speaks to the reader’s state as they long to pull some “sense” from the book itself. Billed as a detective novel, Agent Dickinson uses that genre’s archetypes, imagery, and common objects just enough to get away with using the label. Indeed, just as frequently as you read lines as if pulled from a campy detective show with an avant-garde twist (“Girls, they whistle, though whistling not, as awoken were shields with serif S.O.S.’s fonts, calling blue, tangle day, a bluish piercing foreign on disturbance, fostered shield, now, is that signage saying blue? Who is that, substance, Sheriff Raphael, who??”), you get caught in sweeps...
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That Which Appears by Thomas A Clark

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  On the first page of Farm by the Shore , Thomas A Clark writes: do you know the land where bog cotton grows That land is a peat bog in the Scottish Highlands. Knowing this setting is important insofar as it refers to a particular flora and geology, making it easier to imagine what he’s talking about. At the same time, a specific way of relating to the earth is being referenced, where intimacy with one’s immediate environment yields the ability to identify its rocks and flowers. Clark’s question, arising from the poems themselves, further suggests a stance about poetic language, specifically its potential to direct us toward empirical presence and bring us to a particular place among flowers and stones. Taken to an extreme, it results in stanzas like the following: a hanging valley  of ash, wych elm, hazel willow, birch, oak dense cover of beech light shade of ash wintergreen, ramsons sweet woodruff guilder rose hair moss, bracken fork moss, oak fern reindeer moss Though here...
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