Five Fingers – 2006

Editor Jaime Robles chooses a quotation from Umberto Eco’s The Name of the Rose to help define “uncanny love,” this issues’ theme: “first the soul grows tender, then it sickens…but then it feels the true warmth of divine love and cries out and moans and becomes as stone flung in the forge to melt into lime, and it crackles, licked by the flame…” But there isn’t much moaning here, as it turns out. The work in issue 22 is, for the most part, controlled, tightly wound, sure of itself, and intense. Editor Jaime Robles chooses a quotation from Umberto Eco’s The Name of the Rose to help define “uncanny love,” this issues’ theme: “first the soul grows tender, then it sickens…but then it feels the true warmth of divine love and cries out and moans and becomes as stone flung in the forge to melt into lime, and it crackles, licked by the flame…” But there isn’t much moaning here, as it turns out. The work in issue 22 is, for the most part, controlled, tightly wound, sure of itself, and intense. What’s more uncanny than the loves recounted here are the forms and styles of this work from Michael Tod Edgeron’s “Embogue” (a long and intriguing poem that relies on epigraphs, parenthesis, and anaphora) to Rodrigo Toscano’s excerpt from his poem “In-formational Forum Rousers-Arcing (Satire No. 4),” which relies on brackets, lines of single words, and phonetic spellings. The work in Five Fingers is inventive, playful (though serious), and energetic. I was captivated by Daphne Gottlieb’s “gertude reflects on sex*,” a piece of short fiction (or is this poetry theory?) with extensive footnotes, separate columns of prose (in bold and plain type), and a Stein-like style: “The may be a little scared, I am not so scared, there is so much to be scared of so what is the use of bothering to be scared….” And I was surprised and delighted by Peggi McCarthy’s story “Save Yourself,” a conventional story that cleverly makes old-fashioned conventions about love fashionable.
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