Issue 99: To Laugh or Cry
Our first-ever all-comedy issue runs from the literary to the anecdotal, the parodic to the absurd, the cornball to the macabre, the whimsical to the darkly comic, with a helping of comic complaint from the poets on the side. The darkness, in fact, surprised us though perhaps it shouldn't have, given that laughter is the flip side of fear. There's Jocelyn Brown's "What's a heaven for," a manic comedy about flesh-eating disease. Brian Francis's "The Big Bang" about a Judy Garland impersonator, a failing restaurant, and a suicide-definitely over the rainbow! Heather Birrell's "Bye Bye Flangle Nuts" in which a forlorn son's guilt and grief on the death of his father is tempered by the gently comic detail of his domestic life.
On the lighter side, there's Leon Rooke's sly story about a stalker who is shadowing the real life writer Joyce Carol Oates to try to figure out how she canbe so prolific (the joke, in part, is that Leon also enjoys a hyperactive imagination). There's Elise Moser's "gotcha" story "Losers Weepers," Jessica Grant's joyful "Speckled Head Rides the Eurostar" about a pigeon with attitude, K.D. Miller's "Semper Alicia," the minutes of an Alice Munro book club whose members' approach to the work is more literal than literary, Pasha Malla and Melissa Bell's faux translation of the Rilke poem "Die Sechste Elegie" and many other delightful poetic parodies. (Fiction editor Katia Grubisic, herself a poet, assures me that "everyone knows poets are funnier than fiction writers.")
