A Small Journal with Big Teeth
Bear Review, a small online journal rife with image-driven work, publishes biannually in the Spring and Fall out of Kansas City, Missouri. The editorial board, comprised of MFA graduates, has a penchant for lyric micro-prose but also likes longer poems or short related portions of a story. Brief work is the benchmark for their fiction, nonfiction, and poetry acceptance. Five hundred words or less is a sweet spot though they will consider the occasional longer piece so long as it is worth every extra word.
The published visual art does a good job of embodying the feel of the work as a whole. That could be because it was mostly collage by John Gallaher, whose own work was so prominent in the review it left me suspecting he has a proximal hand in it somewhere else. The poetry within its pages feels like collage: imagistic and professionally piecemealed. Their criteria for publication: “your writing is alive on the page, has urgency and has something at stake.” The editors add that they enjoy something old made new; their submitters exemplify an understanding of literary tradition, genre, and a sense of aesthetics even if the pieces do not conform to the same.
My first sit-down with the issue had my mind spinning. Perhaps I was reading above my lexile range for too long? Or did I have the wrong mindset at the time? My initial reading of their Fall 2018 issue was slow, labored, thick on the tongue, foreign. It was anything but exciting despite diversity in subject and styles. I gave it a rest. At second reading I enjoyed the entire issue much more, readjusting my opinion entirely about the nature of its pieces and thus, this review of it. Bear Review is a balance of dichotomies: light and heavy, dim yet bright, seemingly serendipitous but likely hammered with forethought. If I were to propose a theme editors married themselves to for the purpose of their Fall 2018 issue that could be proven across the array of chosen work, I would guess it had something to do with objects taking on their own lives.
Despite the brevity of works placed within Issue 1 of Volume 5, the weight they collectively manage to acquire in the short distance each traverses is substantial. Danielle Pafunda’s poetry carries heft the way the Book of Revelations does but without any obvious armageddon involved save that which mythological supplantation requires of sex. “Have you seen...the seabird who guards the door to fair use have you/ seen the arrangement of my / hands tipped up wrists bent in a mystic supplication/ stillpulsing tip of Orion's idle sword I once expected it to be sharp but I know now it rends/ with heat with hot deep presence with thoughts I cannot think on my own it rends by/ stretching my interior into the exterior by rendering beauty beside its point.” The later reading made Pafunda’s work worth the time it took to digest and allowed me to appreciate the heft of its muscle. A simple quick read leaves it as just heavy lifting. Several of the reads were content dense but leavened by time.
The language in the review is grounded in its subject with vibrant writing. Language that tries hard without being try-hard is key with this publication. While open to experimentation, the review favors microprose, poetic forms and writing that is self-aware. In Drew Cook's Goliath, we read “Kafka for folks/ who don't read/ Kafka/ as if Texans/ need to be tricked/ into being baptist.” Bear Review wants startling work. Drew Cook’s writing jolted me much the same as the other writers within this review’s pages did. His writing is an ironic slap in the face, yet welcome.
For those who are familiar with these other reviews, the reading felt like a love-child belonging to Juxtaprose and Beautiful Things borne of River Teeth. This magazine has teeth. All of the writing was exceptional and so original it defies neat categorization except to say “flash” and “poetry”. I believe it will grow in favor exponentially over the coming years as a fantastic place to be published. Despite my very first encounter with this review, it is an original, diverse, welcoming magazine excelling in concision. Brilliant and compressed, I could savor it all day, meditate on its writer’s choices and be perfectly content.
