NEW HOPE INTERNATIONAL REVIEW

Thorny Locust is a 36 page stapled magazine edited by Silvia Kofler in Kansas City, USA. According to the back cover blurb, it features poetry, fiction and artwork.

This particular issue claims to

explore the myths we carry to our destinies.

I was also at a loss to understand how the occasional doodles and clumsy squiggles that decorate some of the pages are misleadingly described as art work.

Turning to the writing, I found little I would want to recommend — preferring the poetry to some rather indifferent prose. Worst is a piece called SPECIAL EFFECTS by Rosanna Armendariz. This coarse piece involves a gynecologist (sic), a missing uterus, menstruation and tomato ketchup. It is intended to be amusing, but would probably get the thumbs down from Bernard Manning.

Of the poetry I enjoyed Patrick Dobson's description of a Seer who, IN THE ALLEY

	... fiddles in his pockets;
	Mouse whiskers and rattlesnake traps,
	Badger teeth and bison horns

	A pale waxen yellow
	opaque sky.
	The earth's ears are up.
	We measure the silence
	until a boiling wind arrives
	and trees try to run away.

	Something's always  turning up;
	a bad penny

	On Royal Street, shop after shop sells Mardi Gras masks,
	Cajun hot sauce, and Aunt Sally's original Creole pralines,
	antique jewels, voodoo dolls, and antebellum figurines.

There is such an abundance of journals around at the moment that it makes one stop and think of the sheer number of would-be-writers trying to get published. Thorny Locust is one of the magazines these writers should send their pieces to. For starters, it contains both poetry and prose (of the flash fiction sort, i.e. very short), it reveals a broad spectrum of styles, and lastly, it is a well-presented, visually attractive journal in which to be published. One of the joys of reviewing for NHI is the exposure to such little-known gems as Thorny Locust. With each journal comes exposure to new poets and the marvellous way they use our language. Take BUCKSHOT by Mather Schneider:

	I dream the most marvelous
	sorrow in the world.

THE ORANGE BUTTERFLY by Marina Rubin is another poem in this vein. The butterfly is a tangible object, an enamel brooch, and invokes the feelings of the poet towards dreams of grandeur and of a more fulfilling life thanks to a material object.

Dana Stamps, in GREAT JOB, attacks this defeatist moan:

	You have to create a way of looking at things
	that is so different that it tears the world a new asshole.

	you are the best kind of gorgeous,
	overlooked, kaleidoscope swirls on your feathers
	that are so easy to miss
	while you're picking through the dumpster in the alley.

	In front of about five-thousand spectators,
	on Sunday at a Paris circus performance,
	a skilled archer missed
	the apple atop
	his wife's head
	and the arrow impaled
	his wife's head.
	The master-archer was one
	of the few artists who'd mastered this
	art.

While I have hitherto concentrated on the poetry in Thorny Locust , it would be remiss of me not to mention the prose. Phillip Wexler's CACTUS POACHER I found to be the best offered. The others appeared little more than creative writing class exercises. The twists at the end were routine, whereas in CACTUS POACHER, the horror was unexpected even though the story made you feel uneasy throughout.

Thorny Locust is an interesting read. It is a thought-provoking journal that despite being light in the prose section, is one to watch out for if you like a kaleidoscope of poetic styles.

A largish, squareish, entirely new to me stateside zine in which, says editor Silvia Kofler

writers open doors to time's tombs.

TRUTH AND BEAUTY, REDEFINED FOR KEATS by Robert Michael O'Hearn sets the scene by asking

what else was there to do with idle time? Other than, Beauty simply has no money. Truth no time to explain.

	he's just one more used-up guy
	sitting a cell with a fortune
	in time and nothing to spend it on.

Do you write the obituaries? Are you the young man I should telephone the day I die?

	these post-warriors, winners
	and losers for their team,
	gaze for a moment from their head shots,
	some smiling, never to know
	they are profiled, buried deep
	in the sports section,

	as the United States of America
	keeps score.

	As a young man, I had given up
	hunting — I had never enjoyed
	killing for sport, and fourteen
	months as a soldier in Vietnam
	had ended my interest in guns;
	yet I was now a squirrel hunter.

Often, stateside zines are slick and glossy, but Thorny Locust has a homespun look to it, accentuated by Catherine McCrae's cover and Philip Miller's internal artwork — however, the content is that of a slick and glossy magazine.

Thorny Locust. What a fantastic name for a journal of poetry. This one is the usual black and white, stapled affair, but the paper is of a decent quality and the text is clear throughout. There is even a mixture of quirky illustrations, though one wonders whether they ought to have been printed at a higher DPI, given that every one is pixilated.

There's a decent bit of poetry in the 36 pages of Thorny Locust, and generally it is readable, though easily characterized; the poems are relatively plain narratives, mostly freeverse, and usually ending with some form of posited truth. Occasionally they appear rather like homilies, as in the case of Gary Beck's STRIFE:

	In the eternal struggle
	between the nobles
	and the people,
	the ranks of the forgotten
	are filled by new recruits
	who meet their untimely end,
	victims of those who eat cake,
	yet begrudge a crust of bread
	to those who toil for them. 

	The green frog hops and plops
	In and out of my imagination on the 
	Periphery of my consciousness,
	Like Basho's frog in the pond
	Or the frog in the moon in China.

That said, there will no doubt be something here to please almost anyone and, at the affordable price of $5 per issue, this indulgence will hardly break the bank.