Six Degrees of "Degeneration"

The cover of the Fall/Winter 2010 issue of the Black Warrior Review shows the backside of a canvas; illegible type-print corseted by pink threads. It feels a little bit like looking into the “organs” of the creative process, where there seem to be few clean, neat lines or symmetry for the eyes to rest upon. With its “Degeneration” feature, this issue probes and provokes with experimental poetry, prose, visual and sound art.

Published semi-annually out of the University of Alabama, Black Warrior Review is heavy on poetry, light on non-fiction, and favors shorter prose pieces. While there are no interviews, both B&W and colored art is featured, as well as a chapbook from a nationally known poet in each issue. Online extras include six sound art features accompanying this issue’s “degenerative” feature.

The first quarter of the issue is an eclectic mix of poetry and prose which begins with two haunting poems by Eric Anderson that evoke childhood: “At 3 a.m. everyone wakes/to an animal entering their room”, and other strange Edens: “Beginning with birdsong/and ending in the small intestine/you filled a basin with fat/and milk and carving water/so the deer was a swollen stream/and the fall more of a falling/ You drank until the honeybees were small hands reaching up.”

Further on Nona Caspers offers an excellent trio of short prose pieces that orbit around small realized details of everyday life. In “Two Clean Things," a young woman mourns the death of a friend as she moves her literature thesis and daily routines into a new apartment in a seedy neighborhood. “At night I ate at my table and read stories and listened to the alley people’s bowels and moans and whispers…the morning comes to me like a box of puzzle pieces without the box; it takes me until noon to construct any reasonable or recognizable landscape.” One particular homeless man becomes a part of her daily landscape and she finally makes eye contact with his “one watery gray eye, tender and whale- like”. He throws something to her, which she instinctively reaches for. “It was clean.”