Bird Dog – Spring 2006

Enclosing 76 pages of innovative wordplay by contributors, Bird Dog constitutes a thin journal. But the density of material it contains ranks Bird Dog’s seventh issue among my favorites, one of the reasons for which is the cover—an electric orange with many dogs howling at a birdlike black gnash. My first dive into the material brought to face a labyrinth of giddy texts, where sentences sprang in every direction with ease. Most works deserve praise for their innovation.

Enclosing 76 pages of innovative wordplay by contributors, Bird Dog constitutes a thin journal. But the density of material it contains ranks Bird Dog’s seventh issue among my favorites, one of the reasons for which is the cover—an electric orange with many dogs howling at a birdlike black gnash. My first dive into the material brought to face a labyrinth of giddy texts, where sentences sprang in every direction with ease. Most works deserve praise for their innovation. My favorite sentence is in John Olson’s “Music in Proust”, which runs: “If a piece of air is an oar it might be used to move a mind forward over a pond of paragraphs.” Not to neglect “… imagination alights on these small grooves and quills,” taken from “f#m” by Sueyeun Lee. Other fragments endure in my memory for a day or two after the first read, but the two pieces that stick like thorns in my mind even after a couple of weeks are Doug Nufer’s pieces, “A Ghost of Echoes” and “Dove Dove.” In the first, he switches the meanings of sentences by shifting everything but phonetics within them. Example: “I slip mouthwards into the barrel of the gun, wrapped sure” is re-rendered as “Eyes lip, mouth words, and do the bare-all love-the-gun rapture.” Three pages of these diptychs make me reconsider everything I’ve ever heard in life and wonder if it wasn’t the other meaning I was meant to take (men toot ache). “Dove Dove” is another wonder work of one page that leaves me wanting to become a Nufer groupie. Bird Dog mixes its textual ambitions in whorls, and has three pasted-in color printouts of artwork—imagine that! There is something for everyone eccentric in here.
[www.birddogmagazine.com]