Sleet Magazine – Fall/Winter 2012

This issue of Sleet Magazine is a mash up. Inside there is a knitting monkey, a speaking octopus, and an affectionate doe and buck; there are plastic dolls, cymbal crashes, and “Peter Pan teeth”; and amidst all that, there are also pieces with more serious subject matter.

My favorite lines Jacob Schepers’s “Tug” are the ones that come last: “When we reached the shore / what we took for the tide / was only the water // calling us back.”

Nicholas Sauer’s poem “Learning a Trade” is a wonderfully weaved love poem in heaps of cloth, yarn, and string. It starts,

We peel each other back for practice, only some of us are silk
and others burlap—I’ll measure your grief down to the last
inch, perform open-heart surgery with a Singer.
I love you to distraction, but your hem

is slightly off.  I can wrap you in a ball of yarn,
the riches of my sensitivity and warmth, mark all the alterations
with a pencil in case you forget . . .

In John Abbott’s fiction piece “The House Next Door,” Janet and Pete, husband and wife, decide to buy a new house—right next door to their old one. Although, it’s really Janet’s idea, and, in fact, Pete refuses to move to the new house, eventually buying new furniture to replace the furniture Janet has moved:

She spent most of her time wondering what it looked like at Pete’s. Part of her wondered if he had found the exact same furniture and then set everything up as it had been. Perhaps he was simply waiting for her to get tired of the new place and come back home. All she had to do was walk through the door and things would be more or less as they were.

Poetry, fiction, flash fiction, interviews, and even a section titled “Irregulars” fill this issue. It’s overflowing with brilliant work; the pieces strike emotion and make you lose yourself in the writing.
[sleetmagazine.com]

Sleet Magazine Fall/Winter 2012 review by Kirsten McIlvenna