_P-QUEUE_ 6, Described

Well, I got and read my copy of P-Queue, issue 6. Andrew Rippeon does such great work with this journal – both with the editorial selections and with the production. It’s a really beautifully designed and printed little book. I think that’s why this is the first time I’ve ever seen something of mine in print and been happy with it.

But there is other good stuff in there, e.g.:

- figetoglyphs
- talking body parts
- word grids
- ovidian torture poetry
- a poem written on a typewriter (really!)

- a beautiful lyric sequence by Rob Halpern:

To make the other sky this
Sky being a thing we’ve failed
To do having survived our own

Survival of the one failing sky
The dead this time will bury
Themselves & their graves

- a beautiful & politically uneasy lyric sequence by Stephen Collis:

The overwhelming need to do something
Is this poem helping at all
Brick after brick the
Wall of contracts rising between us

- A terrific and graphically adventurous sequence by Juliette Lee – reflecting on nationhood, (in)visibility, selves:

The “nation” as a furtive
heterogeneity we want
to read as flat

And it casts back
an arbitrary stasis of
“THEN”

[imagine that last side-by-side, about twenty spaces apart]

- Perhaps the most ambitious piece - for the editor and writer/artist - is the reproduction of a letterpress book/imagetext by Emily McVarish, called The Square (Granary Books). The original is 10 ½ x 8 3/8” – but in the journal, it’s more like 3 x 2 ½ - with the text reproduced underneath. Sometimes the printing in the original is so light as to be invisible – which is a shame, b/c on the pages where you can match the text in the original to the text below it, you really see how McVarish is using space and graphic placement to full effect.

- Oh – and all the back issues have sold out. To order, send twelve dollar to:

P-QUEUE
c/o Andrew Rippeon
306 Clemens Hall
English Department
SUNY Buffalo
Buffalo, NY 14260 USA