New Lit Mag Goes For Punches

This issue of  Knockout is more of a Technical Knockout--I wasn't floored, but I was adequately dazed by the quality of work to be found.  It's an interesting mix, with 68 poems, 11 of them translations, and only one short story and two pieces of creative nonfiction.  So one could call it a poetry magazine with a few stray visitors, plus an in-depth interview with the poet Charles Jensen, who says, "I want people to read what I write."  I point that out because I've known writers who aren't looking to publish, which seems peculiar.  "Writing's a form of communication," Jensen continues, "but there's no message delivered if no one ever gets it."  I'm glad that some of the work inKnockout is there to be discovered.

Let's begin with the very short story (five paragraphs) "Landline," by Kim Chinquee.  Initially, it appears to be about place, specifically a home, and the family that inhabits it.  It begins with an auction on the property when the speaker, a woman, is 14.  It ends with the father alone ("He is sixty and no one calls him, ever.").  In between are some stark, momentary observations of family life.  The story is primarily about the father, who "was supposed to hold it all together."  The implication is that he doesn't.  In the end, it's a story about loss, failure, and emptiness.  Chinquee covers decades in less than a page, and the story never feels thin or rushed.  That's quite an achievement.

Paul Lisicky's two pieces of creative nonfiction are each one paragraph long.  They look and feel like prose poems.  The shorter of the two, "The Little Songs," is about a relationship, or rather, the idea of a relationship, and the way two people can merge into one, like "legs, in shadows, moving in single step."  "On the Table" entails meditations atop a massage table during a workout.  It's more confessional, vulnerable, and appealing than "The Little Songs."  But neither really soars.  I mention them because they're the only nonfiction in the issue and at least deserve mention.

Now let's look at some of the poems. 

The winner of Knockout's inaugural poetry prize, Charlotte Innes' "My Friend the Philosopher," is that most challenging of poetic formal structures, the sestina.  From Petrarch to Marilyn Hacker, the sestina, when done well, is a most rewarding form.  The six words Innes has chosen to work with are "map," "world," "blue," "papers," "child," and "pain."  The speaker's friend, the philosopher of the title, carries the weight of the world on his shoulders.  He "sees his brain as a map / some nights, with all the grief in the world / laid out inside."  The speaker counters:  "The world / goes on, my friend, I say.  Can't soothe the pain / of everyone."  That's the poem's narrative tension, and the ease with which Innes manipulates the form's specific language is its triumph.  If I have a quibble at all, it's that she only uses five of the six key words in the envoy.  But rules, as we say, are made to be broken.

If there is a storyline in Denver Butson's poem "Real Estate," it's this:  "an old man walks into a real estate office / and describes in great detail the house he grew up in."  The details encompass not so much a house as the life lived in it, and they are beautifully rendered ("how cool her hands were / on his sick forehead in the mentholated nights").  The old man concludes by asking, "do you have anything like that? / and how much would it cost me?"  The poem doesn't necessarily need the real estate office setting--the images themselves are lovely and haunting--but the setting does set the poem apart from other memory pieces and makes it more unforgettable.  It's the framework on which Butson's images hang.