BOOK REVIEW:
TOUGH POETS REVIEW 02
A BOOK REVIEW BY ERIK MORTENSON
The best word I can come up with to describe Tough Poets Review is eclectic. Editors Kathleen Cullen and Rick Schober have done a remarkable job of offering readers a diverse range of work that truly holds something for everyone. As an academic, I am someone who will certainly read an introduction first. This issue lacks one. But perhaps that is for the best—rather than being given a direction or having the goals of the editors explained, the volume sort of left me on my own to encounter the material firsthand. It was a slightly disorientating experience, but ultimately a rewarding one, as it allowed each work to amend and “play off of” the ones that came before it. Meaning emerged not just in response to a particular work under consideration, but in the interstices between them, and themes, images, ideas, and sensations worked together to create a nexus of allusion that was just as productive in the main as it was in the particular.
The issue contains a variety of genres, with poetry and short prose pieces being dominant. But there are several interviews as well, along with provocative visual images and reproductions of fine art. But this list hides a number of subgenres that challenge assumption and open up new ways of thinking about the material. Some of the poems, for instance, use interesting typography or are ekphrastic responses to visual material. Further blurring boundary distinctions, the volume includes quite a few prose poems, as well as experimental prose work, including various essays that challenge the format. There are interviews, but some are in the form of dialogues or conversations. And this eclecticism extends to date of publication as well. While most of the work in the issue is contemporary, it also includes previously published material like excerpts from Sven Birkerts’s Daybook.
A glance through the Contributors section at the end of the volume is likewise revealing. Emerging artists (new to this reviewer at least) exist alongside mainstays like Lydia Lunch; more academic writers exist alongside poets, novelists, visual artists, and others. Some present themselves as established writers and artists, some are students, while others are people working in a variety of fields such as carpentry who are nevertheless creators. If that is not enough, the issue is surprisingly international in scope, with contributors from countries as diverse as China, Brazil, Iran, Ireland, Nigeria, the UK, and the US, among others. This diversity makes for an interesting mix, with cultural perspectives, “takes” and artistic approaches multiplying in a dizzying array.
If you like your reading varied and feel that juxtaposition is intriguing and productive, Tough Poets Review is a journal worth seeking out and keeping an eye on. I am convinced that these engaging issues will continue to provide much food for thought as disparate voices are collated into issues that are fresh, exciting, and above all thought-provoking. I will certainly be watching.
TOUGH POETS REVIEW 02
AVAILABLE THROUGH TOUGH POETS
Erik Mortenson is a literary scholar, writer, translator, and Faculty Member in English at Lake Michigan College in Benton Harbor, Michigan. He earned a PhD from Wayne State University, taught as a Fulbright Lecturer in Germany, and helped found the English and Comparative Literature Department at Koç University in Istanbul. His scholarship focuses on twentieth-century American literature and culture, with books on Beat writing, Cold War imagery, literary translation, and Allen Ginsberg. He is the author of the memoir Kick Out the Bottom: A Shared Account of a Detroit Mystic and has published translations in Asymptote, Talisman, and Two Lines.
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