Main Street Rag – Winter 2004

Don’t let the title fool you—there’s nothing rag-like about this small, beautiful journal. Encompassing two short stories, an illustrated humor piece on a phallic mushroom species, an interview with poet Mark Morris, reviews and poetry, the latest volume of Main Street Rag is as elegant in presentation as it is edgy in content. Mike Watson’s cover art alone is worth the issue price. The two short fiction pieces by Nils Reid and Mary Ann Ruhl Thomas are in keeping with Main Street’s professed bias for grittier material, treating, respectively, a morally lapsed missionary and a girl contemplating killing her father. However, it is the poetry that dominates these pages, with some established voices alongside many newer ones. Aside from a couple of sonnets, the journal favors free verse in a range of styles, from Louis Daniel Brodsky’s highly imagistic “Conception: A Recollection,” to Kevin Sweeney’s facetiously trendy “Hopefully.” There are memorable speakers in these poems. Pamela Garvey’s beggar in “Toward the Face of Absence” challenges us: “Who assumes responsibility? / Who slips pennies into a cup clanging / with emptiness.” But the editors also enjoy a laugh and on the facing page give us Nathan Graziano’s English teacher, desperate to interest a terminally bored class: “Extended metaphors / sweat in the sheets, / Payment for sticking around / for the entire poem.” Graziano closes his poem with an unforgettable deadpan that I won’t give away here. Intellectually stimulating, accessible, enjoyable—Main Street Rag is everything you could want from a literary magazine. [Main Street Rag, Main Street Rag, 4416 Shea Lane, Charlotte, NC, 28227. E-mail:[email protected]. Single issue $7. http://www.mainstreetrag.com/TheHub.html]- DM Don’t let the title fool you—there’s nothing rag-like about this small, beautiful journal. Encompassing two short stories, an illustrated humor piece on a phallic mushroom species, an interview with poet Mark Morris, reviews and poetry, the latest volume of Main Street Rag is as elegant in presentation as it is edgy in content. Mike Watson’s cover art alone is worth the issue price. The two short fiction pieces by Nils Reid and Mary Ann Ruhl Thomas are in keeping with Main Street’s professed bias for grittier material, treating, respectively, a morally lapsed missionary and a girl contemplating killing her father. However, it is the poetry that dominates these pages, with some established voices alongside many newer ones. Aside from a couple of sonnets, the journal favors free verse in a range of styles, from Louis Daniel Brodsky’s highly imagistic “Conception: A Recollection,” to Kevin Sweeney’s facetiously trendy “Hopefully.” There are memorable speakers in these poems. Pamela Garvey’s beggar in “Toward the Face of Absence” challenges us: “Who assumes responsibility? / Who slips pennies into a cup clanging / with emptiness.” But the editors also enjoy a laugh and on the facing page give us Nathan Graziano’s English teacher, desperate to interest a terminally bored class: “Extended metaphors / sweat in the sheets, / Payment for sticking around / for the entire poem.” Graziano closes his poem with an unforgettable deadpan that I won’t give away here. Intellectually stimulating, accessible, enjoyable—Main Street Rag is everything you could want from a literary magazine. [Main Street Rag, Main Street Rag, 4416 Shea Lane, Charlotte, NC, 28227. E-mail:[email protected]. Single issue $7. http://www.mainstreetrag.com/TheHub.html]- DM