NEW HOPE INTERNATIONAL REVIEW

The intriguing cover artwork, the pencil sketch FLUFFY KITTEN was done by Wheeler McMahon, aged two and a half. Sam Cole who provided the monochrome centre-spread illustrations WAVE and SKETCH TOWARD "DOOM RIDES TO MT. GILEAD" appears to have a precocious rival.

Bathtub Gin is a biannual literary/art magazine:

a bootlegger of ideas, untaxed and unregulated

Donna Vorreyer of Chicago opens the poetic bottle. One hopes that the toddler-artist Wheeler McMahon doesn't take a slug of DUST TO DUST at bedtime. The poem describes the nightmarish demise of a puppet consumed by flames; it's a timely study of the self-destructing power of mendacity:

	Pinocchio pops and crackles in the air,
	the smoldering smack of splintering wood
	echoing like a gunshot 
	. . . 
		just one more little lie,
	to fuel the flame with just a bit more nose
	before he falls to embers
	and curls to smoke.

	pulled the guns down from the rack. Mossberg 500. Quivering, he
	plunged the clip into the gun. Japanese Type 99. He ran along
	firing .
	. K3 Bullpup . 
	. Blaser R93 Bolt-Action Rifle . 
	. Beretta Shotgun A300 .
	. Accu-Tek AT32 .
	. . . 
	bullet went into his face; the fatal bullet went into his face and 
	found its way to his brain, into the brain stem . 

	A gunshot cracks the air and something heavy hits the floor.

$100 million golden egg

so much for so few

champion and magnify this gift of poetry

In her poem DIGGERS the Californian psychologist G. M. Monks, proud possessor of 35 rejection letters, highlights the dangers inherent in every money-grubbing enterprise:

	Under listless rain, Sutter Creek was overrun with miners digging
		for gold. Late in the day, twenty year old Jack Miller got
		shot in the back.

This publication describes itself as

a bootlegger of ideas, untaxed and unregulated.

The poetry is varied and fresh, looking at life from interesting angles. Timons Esaias' poem A BREAK FOR FREEDOM IN THE 61C CAFÉ is memorable in its deadpan delivery of a story of a girl running away with her toy lion. The girl will learn to steal pizzas while:

	the lion will prowl for
	unattended toy sheep

	is torn between
	loss and secret admiration.
	She trusts the lion.

	throwing the grass in the air,
	his cat leaping for it

	like a true zen cat

	the contours of their bodies blending
	only shadows in the lunar glow.

This is the last issue for a year or so, as the editor takes time off to settle down with his family in New Orleans. There are poems from a handful of poets, with a few prose pieces and graphics, and a number of reviews. There is interesting work from Dennis Saleh, Carmen Germain, Alessio Zanelli, William Beyer, J.T. Whitehead and others, though a good deal of the work, it must be said, aims for a rather too cool, at times showy obtuseness of expression.

J.T. Whitehead writes in extracts from his BLUE COLLAR SERIES that

	I don't really care for the wealthy.
	They never much struck me as healthy —
	living by money,
	dying by money,
	wrapped in their green, like a mummy.

	On another piece of paper
	a manageable poem
	is beginning

	But I am at the beach
	hemming and hawing
	with the wind

	I cannot get 
	the words right
	to anything

	not even the air
	which is at a
	peculiar perpendicular

	to the sky
	which is at a
	peculiar perpendicular

	to the sea

	Death came
	On the job,
	In late Winter,
	The train moving rapidly
	Through extended landscape
	Of deep snow.

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