Summer Fruits

The latest issue of Goblin Fruit is just as it should be: decadent and enticing, too heavy to digest in one sitting, and posessed of a haunting aftertaste.  I've been sampling it for the past two days, laying it aside and coming back to it, for these poems are dishes too rich not to be savored slowly.

from Rossetti's Goblin Market, artist unknown

Samantha Henderson, author of Heaven's Bones, has this to say about Goblin Fruit, and I concur:

The thing that continually impresses me about GF (besides the poetry, but you knew that) is that to me it's the closes thing I've seen to something in a virtual space (i.e. the internet) be a tactile object.  . . . With new models of buying and playing music we're losing the idea of an album and its implied narrative, but the poems in GF always strike me as being arranged like an album, and I think this adds to the idea that it's something crafted rather than pretty pixels.

This issue was full of sing-songs and summer.

"Burnt Lyric" by Sofia Samatar mixes the heat of desert places with the bloodlessness of ghosts in the hills of Spain.  It has a highly lyric quality and a fascinating back-story.

Under the cypress tree, my lover said to me,
If it's evidence you're looking for,
you'll find it.
You'll prove whole cities from a broken brooch, and blur
what the lost dead know.

Reminds me of how sometimes, in our enthusiasm, we try so hard to "figure out" or explain art, that we end up killing it.

The last line sobers with its finality:

Death, like the lyric, is carried in the mouth.

Sonya Taaffe's "Lyric Fragment" snake-charms the sensual Mediterranean:

Under the olives, I unbraid your hair
dark as violets in the sea-shifting light,
the sea who shrugs and turns a shoulder
as black and white sails come and go.

Violet-dark hair and seas that shrug . . . needs no exegesis.

I love this magazine.  So.  Much.  Donate?