The Hype is Well-Deserved; Artifice is A Good, Good Thing

February 15, 2010

I’m a little behind here; I had to wait a week to get any mail, thanks to the Snowpocalypse and my apparently not-so-intrepid mail carriers. But when my impressively packed little copy of Artifice arrived in giant stack of backlogged mail on Friday, it was so lovely I started reading it right there at my mailbox. Only the pointed glares of My Crabbiest Neighbor (trying to get around me to get his mail, I guess) finally drove me to stop reading and drag my stack of magazines and chapbooks and Netflix DVDs back to my apartment, where I spent the rest of the weekend stealing five minutes here, ten minutes there, to read all of the inaugural issue.

And color me impressed. Really impressed. And satisfied in a way I often am not after reading a literary magazine. This is a literary magazine for grownups. It does not shout at you. It does not scream ”zine,’ ‘DIY,’ or ‘punk.’ It provides, in a quiet, dignified way, a truly amazing smorgasbord of poetry, fiction, and something sort of in between. There wasn’t a single piece that didn’t sell itself beautifully, that wasn’t a suck-you-in-if-you-read-even-the-first-few-words-and-now-you’ll-have-to-stand-here-in-your-kitchen-reading-the-whole-thing-while-your-cat-whines-to-be-fed-sorry-kitty kind of piece.

Every piece is fantastic–the whole issue is just so perfectly curated–but I did have some especial favorites. Roxane Gay‘s “Contrapasso,” a meal within a meal, is perhaps my favorite piece of writing from her yet. And that’s saying a lot. The always good Blake Butler has a piece, “AND THIS WOULD HAPPEN TOO IN OTHER HOMES,” that pulls you in like a skein of yarn, winding and winding until you find yourself suddenly, abruptly at the end, released. Cynthia Reeser has a prepackaged story included, which somehow manages to be universal and funny and poignant and lovely.

And finally, one of the best things that happens when you read great magazines like Artifice: the discovery of fantastic artists you didn’t know existed. I think I’ve read Ori Fienberg‘s poems about forty times each since Friday; that’s how obsessed I am with them. They are things of meaning, things of hidden meaning and overt meaning, things of wordplay and sound and light and great sadness and understanding and they are very, very good. Read this (from his poem “The Strong Man”) and then tell me you don’t want more:

The heaviest things were easy. He reorganized rivers, he could always
keep a secret, and he never cried.

One day he stayed in bed because his sheets were too insubstantial. To
rise up he put tragedy on one shoulder and the sky on the other.

Wonderful, no? And there’s so much more good stuff in here that I haven’t even mentioned yet. If you haven’t already, trust me, you must subscribe to this amazing magazine. Must.