Light Quarterly – Winter 2003/2004

If you’ve ever wondered where all the Dorothy Parkers have gone, they’re submitting poems to Light, wearing glasses, seldom receiving passes, and all.

If you’ve ever wondered where all the Dorothy Parkers have gone, they’re submitting poems to Light, wearing glasses, seldom receiving passes, and all. This quarterly magazine of light verse specializes in rhyming wit, puns, palindromes, and a heap of good old-fashioned showing off (Robert Schechter, “My Grandmother, the Actress”: “Of the two famous playwrights / who charmed and beguiled her, / Oscar was Wilde / but Thornton was Wilder.”). The poems here fall under such broad categories as “The Mating Season,” “Quandaries?” and “Warped Worlds”; sometimes the mere inclusion of a certain work under one of those titles brings a smile. It all ends with essays and reviews, including a surprisingly fine piece by Barbara Loots on the nature and purpose of greeting card poetry. If you’ve ever been accused of Nerd Humor, you’ll want to take out a subscription to this one. However, if puns make you groan, you might want to skip it, or at least pass up Christopher Scribner’s very funny “Shattered,” inspired by an inmate’s attempt to escape jail by breaking a bulletproof window with his bare rear end. It contains the line, “And never let a little pane deter you.” [Light, P.O. Box 7500, Chicago, IL 60680. Single issue $6. http://www.lightquarterly.com] – JQG