Glass – January 2014

It is with sad hearts that the editors announce that this will be the last issue of Glass: “We love Glass but we must acknowledge the amount of work it takes to keep it going,” they write. It’s always sad to see magazines fold, but I’m glad that they are making the effort to keep all the past issues accessible: “we want to make our commitment to our poets clear: we will make sure your work stays published and stays available for your readers.”

It is with sad hearts that the editors announce that this will be the last issue of Glass: “We love Glass but we must acknowledge the amount of work it takes to keep it going,” they write. It’s always sad to see magazines fold, but I’m glad that they are making the effort to keep all the past issues accessible: “we want to make our commitment to our poets clear: we will make sure your work stays published and stays available for your readers.”

Charles O’Hay tells us in his poem that our mother is not the woman “quick with her paddle” or even the one “who mends us / with strands of her own hair.” It is the water: “who soothes our scars, wipes away / our doubts, eases our thirst, / and readies us with song.”

I appreciated Jacqeline Jules’s poem in which she convinces us that ostriches aren’t as dumb as they may appear, “from a distance by judgmental eyes.” Although the ostrich doesn’t fly, it runs, leading predators away from her nest:

I wouldn’t mind powerful legs
to out-run malignant fears.
Certainly seems better than
standing in place
to face lions, leopards, and wild dogs
hungry for flesh and feathers.

Christine Guarino’s “The Swallowers” is like two poems weaved together, every other stanza being in italics. In one voice, the speaker instructs how to become a sword swallower: “Start small. A dime, maybe the button from your shirt. / The top hat piece from Monopoly. A marble.” The italicized voice weaved in between warns of the dangers of such a thing: “. . . Intentional foreign body ingestion . . . is costly. Endoscopic retrieval requires general anesthesia. / Efforts should be focused on reducing these incidents.” You can read every other stanza to distinguish the voices or read it all together; the contrast is perfect.

The poems in this issue are aware of their senses: “the farms are lacquered in smells / of turned cream and cut hay” (Monica Rose Burchfield’s “Quitting Ohio”), and, “there were tomatoes, sacksful, / branches of basil, mint tipped with white stars” (Lisa Bickmore‘s “All Souls”), and, “with your nipping jaws, your snarled curls, / the perilous brink of your nose . . .” (Burchfield’s “The Bathers”).

It’s a pity that the journal had to flounder, I would have much liked to continue following it and reading its high quality and image-rich poems.
[www.glass-poetry.com]