Bender Magazine

by Editor: Jeff Epley.. ISSN: 1097-5578. issue three Bender Magazine, Long Beach Downtown Station, P.O. Box 21261, Long Beach, CA 90801.

Book Review by

Downtown Long Beach has The Queen Mary tied up in its harbor and you can have a tour if you so wish. Motels are not so expensive. Bender Magazine makes no mention of the Queen Mary - Maybe it is the Queen E? Charles Bukowski lived next door in San Pedro. Gerald Locklin lives in Long Beach. Bender Magazine has a pullout chapbook by Gerald Locklin. I don’t know if this pullout chapbook counts as one of Locklin’s 100 plus books or not. But the poems matter. Locklin’s contribution is called Incomplete Reformation. The chapbook is the center of Bender and Locklin’s clean, unadorned Americansense of writing is the central governing poetic of Bender and those writers within. There are 28 poets in Bender and one piece of prose by John Brantingham called Growing up in the Red Desert. In seven paragraphs, two pages, Brantingham captures the confused essence of our sometimes ridiculous and truly bizarre first sexual information. Most of this we receive from our awkward parents. He does this with good, classic, direct humor. It’s a sound, deep laugh. This story should be reprinted and reprinted and republished. Let’s hear more. Of course the issue goes on and on - Dan Sicoli, Todd Kalinski, Joan Joby Smith, Lisa Glatt and hey, Joseph Shields, I know, I think I remember, Mrs. Matulka.

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