The Whirligig (Pulp with a Pulse) - Issue 3

by Frank J. Marcopolos - Editor/Publisher. Spring 2001. , 4809 Avenue N., No. 117, Brooklyn, NY. 11234.

Book Review by Michael Basinski

I flipped this issue open on this hot, hippo boiling afternoon and came upon Jennifer Callahan’s All the Rage, a short story, that begins, “Live flesh has amnesia….” Indeed, a tasty cherry covered tire-iron of fiction, I thought. And the poetry within this magazine also, I thought when I read Jonathan A. Golberg’s poetry, “My mind is melted…” and again when I read Fatigue by Q.R. Maber, “natural as flies fucking/ on your microwave. “Indeed, poetry of endless African nights in pools of oil beneath old cars. Well, this has to be some of the better fiction and poetry I’ve read in a good while and balanced with a sense of what is the best and most wild of American writing, that writing that lances the boil of mind. You know, good reader, that there are a lot of magazines with a lot of shit poems in them and the fiction is worse. But you get this true lion roaring sense that Frank Marcopolos knows what he likes, and how to read, and how to publish and he has guts and eats insects on Wheaties with bleach. He has made a fine thing here. I recall that Bukowski started writing slight, short stories and I think that maybe the folks in here, well - Marcopolos has discovered the next generation and is opening them up and allowing them to fly into our thick, chocolate blood hooded and howling nights.