It's an issue that features Flash (Tania Hershman, Meg Pokrass, etc), though there's still poetry, prose-poetry and prose. It's interesting to see different types of short texts side by side. I've written elsewhere about how to shorten texts. They can be made more narrow, more shallow, or (least successfully) just scaled down. Clarity can be sacrificed. If you take some prose, knock out a few words, remove punctuation, then add line-breaks, you can create something that readers are prepared to reconstruct into prose, as long as you call it poetry. Classified as prose, readers might think it badly written. Several of these shortening options are exploited in this issue. Poetic language and dislocations happen as much in the texts with many line-breaks as in the paragraphed texts.
Some well-known Flash writers have been giving a chance to supply blurb-sized quotes. It's difficult to find new ways to say that short texts can have big effects. Here's Christopher Gonzales - "Flash fiction is a writer's playground for form and voice. Great flash fiction can offer you the world in a pill-sized package". The first sentence makes Flash sound self-indulgent. The second sounds like drug-pushing - "pill" has negative connotations for me. Maureen Langloss writes that "Compression, intensity, and nuance are my favorite things about flash". My guess is that many poetry readers admire the same features. Are they any harder to pull off in prose? RB Pillay loves flash because it allows for traditional narrative, and because it also permits "a type of radically compressed narrative that is impossible to replicate at any other scale." Pillay's comments seem to accept the need for narrative of some sort. It's this requirement that cuts across the desire to add more poetic features. If a text sacrifices narrative, and has flashy imagery, I think it's more fairly described as poetry. Finola Scott's piece contains "On the unravelling pasture occasional trees cluster for company", which as prose might be considered purple. If the piece lacks line-breaks and is more a mood piece than a narrative then it's I'd say it's short prose rather than poetry or Flash.
I've noticed that people who offer their pieces as poems often don't like them to be re-classified as prose. The term "Poetry" still has an aura.
I didn't notice any Formalist pieces in this issue. A shopping list is a prose construction capable of managing discontinuities. The list format is used by poets, but I think prose writers could reclaim it. Ditto with Abecedarians - some foregrounding of language and form is possible in prose. The content, the amount of foregrounding, and the context will determine how successfully the writer might claim that the result is poetry.
Novel readers often don't like short stories. I wouldn't be surprised if short story readers didn't in general like Flash. I think certain poetry readers might like it, those who like accessible, character-based free-form poems with a bit of a twist. Such readers will appreciate the features that the Flash practitioners admire - compression, nuance, sense-based descriptions, lack of back-story, etc.
My favourite piece was Cheryl Pearson's poem, "What a fish dreams of".
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