Literary reviews by Tim Love.
Warning: Rather than reviews, these are often notes in preparation for reviews that were never finished, or pleas for help with understanding pieces. See Litref Reviews - a rationale for details.

Saturday, 21 April 2018

"Magma 70" (Spring 2018)

86 big, nearly square pages - about 50 of poetry (3 poems/page sometimes), 10 of reviews, and a wide selection of articles. Poems by Matt Sweeney, Richie McCaffery, Josh Ekroy, etc. This issue has a "Europe" theme, to which it sticks quite closely. There are different themes and editors each issue. The feature that struck me was that several of the poems repeat a word many times - "Invitation" has "Hotel Europa" in each of its 10 stanzas; "Les Vacances" has "Monsieur" in each of its 4 stanzas; "Duck Three Ways" has "aka" 5 times and "According to" 3 times; "La Monnaie" has 16 lines starting with "In the"; "Hungarians" has "Hungarians" 8 times, and "Slowly, as the talk goes on, we are getting nowhere" has "nowhere" in each of its 14 lines. There's a fair amount of non-standard typography too.

The launch was in Europe House with well over 100 attendees on Apr 6th. I managed to squeeze in at the back.

No comments:

Post a Comment