Brand New Lit Mag...Debut Issue a Success

Palooka heralds itself as a “journal of underdog excellence,” and in its debut issue, it presents itself as just that. From Amy Heiden’s eerie, prolonged exposure photograph of a headless mannequin entitled “I Wanna Be a Star” that graces the cover, to editor Nicholas Maistros’ opening note,  addressed to “Palooka People” everywhere, and charmingly tackling the magazine’s own identity confusion when he proclaims “Who the hell are we, anyway?" bookended with editor Jonathan Starke’s likening of the construction of the collection to that of a wind-up toy, the magazine indicates its diversity of style.

The opening story, Dustn M. Hoffman’s “Scratch,” is the vividly descriptive present tense tale of Morris,  a factory worker whose monotonous job to “bend more aluminum—endless sheets of metal he must curve, mold, manipulate into cylinders, then start the geometry over again, from punch-in to punch-out,” has him questing for a winning scratch ticket. As we closely follow Morris through his menial journey, we learn through lovely prose and everyman characters constructed in the heart of middle America, that “now he’s making things happen, winning it back. This will lead to something.”

The issue continues with Ryan J. Browne’s collection of three poems, each aptly ruminating on its own theory with lovely lyricism. Chrissy Spallone’s “A World Without Surprises” is a well-drawn and conceptually intriguing comic about a tech-centered but unfeeling dystopia, even if the dialogue is a little convoluted. The flash piece by Dan Piorkowski entitled “Tupperware” is a stunningly visceral and haunting glimpse of memory about a boy who throws fish into the river in his mother’s Tupperware containers, and the curiosity behind the gesture.

Kelley Rae’s non-fiction piece “Blue Beach,” opens with a lovely description of “camp” and we learn that “Just as we all have unique fingerprints, each river has its own motion, smells, and sounds.”  What begins as a fairly innocent tale of childhood folly quickly takes a sinister turn when the children head to another cabin only to find a jar containing a human fetus in the kitchen.  This terrifying image is woven with the death of the narrator’s father a few weeks later, so that by the end of the story, we know “…I left my childhood there. I often think if I go there, I can find it.”

Jona Colson’s “[God-help and sparrow]” continues the poetry of the collection with an intensely imagistic piece where the lancing of a pustule is compared to “a butterfly with only one wing growing.” Emma Bean’s “War Touched Us Here,” is a boyhood tale of life on the homefront, told withthe ethereal energy of a recollected memory where “Everything is colored by a soft blue-gray haze, either from the fading of time or the cigarette that was permanently  attached to my mother’s hand.”

The glossy-paged middle section of the collection provides a slew of diverse artwork from two artists. Among some of the most interesting are Andrew Abott’s politically motivated portrait of George Wasington entitled tired of being the…(2009), and Jim Fuess’ vibrant Abstract Painting Hawk in Full Strike (1989) and equally beautiful Blue and Purple Abstract Painting (2007).

“Tuscaloosa Irredenta” by Carl Peterson, is the story of Ted, a man “made nervous by his own desire for categorization.” The simplicity of language, the sharpness of syntax, such as the line “the first time he had sex with Natalie, it took the shape of an accident that they almost managed to prevent,” shapes the characterization of a man who is so concerned with how others define him, he isn’t sure who he is on his own.