Bender Volume 4, Issue 4. 2001-2002.

by Editor Jeff Epley.. Long Beech Station, PO Box 21261, Long Beech, Ca. 90801.

Book Review by Michael Basinski

Let the great Moby Dick smash the hull of the dull Pequad. Allow the zebras and the people waiting for the bus in the cold of February to eat hot fish frys served by old nuns. Allow the cans at the curb be filled with the money of the rich. Allow the car to always start and the dents to pop out as if the car were foam and let the foam on the top of your beer be thick and free. Let there be Bender number four, NO. 4! Numero FourO! Ah. Up through the dullness, well, let’s start off by noting that the guts and heart and soul center section of this issue are a section by Ron Koertge’s called On the Horn- READ his poem In the Dirty Book Store. Ah, the strange joys of dirty book stores. Ah, my lost youth. And let me quote Jeff Karl Butler’s Beer Song:

pale
ale
sale

And a great poem by Joan Jobe Smith, which from up on the go-go stage her insight into the rotting souls of young pinheaded guys in the bar slices in to what is essentially wrong with America. And another great one by Lyn Lifshen who cuts into the pale blue soul of AM with a morning without coffee blade. And it goes on with Gerald Locklin and Nathan Graziano and Robert L. Pernick and Mark Wisniewski. These are new forms of gods here. These gods refuse to die. Let the poetry of Bender magazine take the place of the spongy, diseased brain of Attorney General John Asscraft. Let the grass grow dewy on the palm of Christ. Let Bender magazine and Jeff Epley be the cure for lung cancer so we can all smoke until eternity. Let Bender magazine and Bender’s editor Jeff Epley make money for this labor of love and the love that will drain all organs of sex and let them fill up fast again for another draining. Let Bender magazine and editor Jeff Epley ride dinosaurs to Australia and to India and on the graves of the great poets in a form of Stegosaurus homage, homage of powerful dinosaurs is Bender and Epley listening to Kenneth Rexroth and Kenneth Fearing and Kenneth Patchen and Charles Bukowski. Epley, out there, keep riding. Man, Christ, Jesus, he has made one fucking beautiful magazine.