Vol. IV – Literary Superheroes!!
Faster than a prom-night virgin, more powerful than his pimply lust. Able to leap mountainous pretentions with a single “Ha!”. It’s the fourth edition of The Ampersand Review! Read some of the thrilling exploits of The Ampersand Hero League:
Poetry
EVERY VALLEY by Anne Babson
BAD MEAT by Ron Seitz
REVEL (BREASTS) by Felicia A. Rivers
SQUAT by Danny Lawless
THE WAIT FOR CAKE by Melissa Broder
PRIMER by Gregory Lawless
Fiction
TWO, TO TANGO by Rebecca Serle
THE STRAY, Adam Cogbill
TERR-BEAR LOVES JIMMY, by Tim Jones-Yelvington
Online Exclusives!
THE STUPID THINGS THAT SWAY US ON THE BREEZE OF PORTABLE HOUSE FANS, by Echezona Udeze
LOOSE TIES & BOOMERANGS, by Maryn Ellery
The Ampersand Reviews!
CRACKS AND SLATS
Mark Jackley
chapbook, Amsterdam Press, 2009
Review by Danny Lawless
Mark Jackley’s remarkable chapbook Cracks and Slats offers the reader many pleasures, not least is its straightforwardness: a flatness of style that conceals – though not very well – its author’s immense gifts of style and nuance. One hears many echoes here – of Simic and Michaux, Strand, Ponge, the early Robert Bly, Nicanor Parra, George Trakl, a bit of Franz Wright, even the prose of Wille Vlautin. Jackley is a master of the apercu, if one can apply that high-falutin word to these memory-narratives of family and dogs, houses, a man eating a burrito in a movie house, of shit jobs and love-making. Here a spruce is “a shy dancer/holding the hem of her dress/on the verge of leaping”; a divorce decree arrives “in the iron stillness/of the mailbox whose/mouth was hanging open/in the April breeze/ much like mine”; and, my favorite, the lover who dreams of he and his partner as two clementines “nestled in our crate/ of wood and nails, the plastic/netting is the end/of the world/ exactly/as it ought to be.” Ordinarily, one is happy to come across even one such passage in a poet’s work. Here, there are others, equally uncanny, equally spare and haunting, like this. Many others.
