Mary Burger
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Issue 29 | Fall 2023

Issue 29 brings flirty game wardens, nuns in a cavern, mysterious transmissions, the world’s youngest knife thrower, the names of Argentina’s rivers, streams, and lakes, the fountain of youth, gray dawns, and ferocious appetites. It’s about war, lies and misinformation, languages and language, erasures, brutal occupations, bad reasons for enlisting, and signs that refract so deeply we can’t trace their path back to the world. It’s about sinister radio signals from the fillings in your teeth or maybe over there among the trees.

Includes new work by James Nulick, Mary Burger, Denis Tricoche, Yuliia Iliukha and Hanna Leliv, John Gu, Iliana Vargas, Lena Greenberg, and Michelle Mirabella, Kelly Krumrie, Juan José Saer and Will Noah, Afsana Begum and Rifat Munim, Michael Loyd Gray, William M. McIntosh, Laura Zapico, Stella Vinitchi Radulescu and Domnica Radulescu, Skye Gilkerson, Adam Day, Ariana Den Bleyker, Justin Vicari, Rebecca Macijeski, Cletus Crow, and Ayshia Müezzin.

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About the About

Mary Burger

“Story is, you come up over the rise and the coastal meadow spreads out in front of you all the way to the cliff, the grass bends in waves and the water beyond it is a steely rippling sheet.”

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Optical Occlusions 12: Something About Drones

Mary Burger

From the Optical Occlusions series, looking at how perceptions of landscape are altered by technology and infrastructure. This piece is in the collection of the Sutter/California Pacific Medical Center Cathedral Hill Hospital in San Francisco, opening in 2019.

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Issue 19 | Winter 2019

Issue 19 includes work by Jesse Falzoi, Miguel Gardel, Fradl Shtok (translated by Jordan Finkin and Allison Schachter), Anu Kandikuppa, Daniel Uncapher, L.I. Sargis, Stefan Kiesbye, J S Khan, Luciana Erregue-Sacchi, Harford Hopson, Elvira Vigna (translated by Adrian Minckley) Luis Miguel Rivas Granada (translated by David Feller Pegg), Karin Wraley Barbee, Dennis Vannatta, Nadija Rebronja (translated by Ivana Maksić) Jared Pearce, Thomas Griffin, Stella Díaz Varín (translated by Rebecca Levi), and Kathleen Hellen. Cover art by Mary Burger.

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Rowland Saifi’s The Minotaur’s Daughter

Review by Mary Burger

The Minotaur’s Daughter by Rowland Saifi takes place in a small, unnamed beach town with a lone second-person narrator who relates the peculiar story of how he comes to live in a sort of reverse exile, left behind after everyone else has gone.

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Contributor News: Mary Burger

Trafficking, screenprint on paper (2014)Mary Burger (“Excerpt from Red Dust Tangle,” Issue 2) has a couple of new art shows coming up.Root Division's 13th Annual Art AuctionFundraiser for the nonprofit San Francisco arts organizationOpening reception Saturday, October...

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Review: An Army of Lovers by Juliana Spahr and David Buuck

By Mary Burger
Koki and Demented Panda, characters in An Army of Lovers by Juliana Spahr and David Buuck, describe themselves as mediocre poets. I’d be more inclined to describe them as discouraged poets or dispirited poets. Glum poets. Koki and Panda are discouraged because, while they believe more than anything in the power of poetry, they have to admit that poetry does not seem to be making a dent in the forces of evil—war, unbridled capitalism, climate destruction, the rest of it.

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Contributor News: Mary Burger

Mary Burger’s (“Excerpt from Red Dust Tangle,” Issue 2) project Razzle Dazzle Melanism will be opening at Compound Gallery and Studios1167 65th StreetOakland, CA 94608 Opening reception Saturday, June 28 from 6 to 9pmRegular hours Wed through Sun, 12-7pmThe show is on...

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Review: Hank Forest’s Party by Ascher/Straus

By Mary Burger
Hank Forest’s Party is the latest volume of a collaborative project, part novel, part memoir, part philosophy, written by Sheila Ascher and Dennis Straus and published under the name Ascher/Straus. The ongoing project Monica’s Chronicle, begun in the 1970s, is a narrative of the process of narration. Narrator Monica records experiences of everyday life in a neighborhood in Rockaway Park, Queens, and weaves her notes through reflections and reinterpretations about the connections between experience, memory, and writing.

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Contributor News: Mary Burger

Read/hear newly published works from Mary Burger (“Excerpt from Red Dust Tangle,” Issue 2): “Codes of Incompletion” at Textsound, issue 18 and Eleven Eleven, issue 16 and “Matlike” at Poetry Center Chapbook Exchange.She is also showing prints at Collector Gallery in...

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Issue 2 | Winter 2013

Your Impossible Voice #2 features new work from New York Foundation for the Arts Fellow Thaddeus Rutkowski, multiple Best American Poetry contributor Arielle Greenberg, MacArthur Fellow and Berlin Prize winner Han Ong, Bay Area favorites Lewis Buzbee and Mary Burger, 2013 Before Columbus Foundation American Book Award winner Will Alexander, and more

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Bind yourself to us with your impossible voice, your voice! sole soother of this vile despair.

—Arthur Rimbaud, “Phrases

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