“‘They’re just right. Soft and expressive,’ says Bliss Barnes when asked to describe her breasts to a personal ad suitor. So opens Jill Hoffman’s Topless, the funniest. poignant, most beautifully written, pleasurable saga of a woman’s journey through breast cancer and the exhilarating disappointments of online dating. She nudges aside the medical mores of technicians, nurses, doctors, oncologists, and the Gilda’s Club support group, as few have met anyone like Bliss, with her charm and allure which she refuses to leave in the waiting room. Her verbal stink bombs explode as she courageously marches on in her long-pointed boots undergoing chemo (making it a picnic), multiple surgeries, radiation, and match.com dates. Delightful and inspiring, harrowing and breathtakingly funny, yet always a bittersweet undertow at the vulnerabilities of the flesh.” – Stephanie Emily Dickinson, Harlow/Smith Postcards: Icons in Black & White
“Sharp, reflective, Paul Wuensche’s voice is not self- depreciating in a false way, but is the voice of someone not afraid to look into the mirror long enough for it to be uncomfortable. These are poems I look forward to re-reading.” – Aileen La Tourette, winner of the Long Canon InternationalPoetry Award
“Lewis Carroll and Aldous Huxley may come to mind, but Rabbits are Strange, When You Are AStranger claims its own territory as a 21st century masterwork. It is a charmed realm where the creatures most authentic are animals. ‘What is art?’ Mia asks. Astro holds forth in ‘rabbitish’: ‘It’s aworld that is more than a world. It contains all realities. It includes everything from the smallest antto the biggest maple tree, and everything is interconnected. Art is a giant glowing spider web of opportunities.‘ Alexander Iskin has created a mosaic of light-infused lyrical prose, a fully imagined and realized world laced with humor and illustrations, where even those charged with pitting an invasive technology against the vulnerable seem redeemable. Fable, allegory, magic realism, fantasy—I hesitate to classify the novel. That’s up to you, the reader.” — Stephanie Dickinson, Harlow/Smith Postcards: Icons in Black & White
This triumphant 25th issue is marked by generous representations from many Mudfish writers, such as Stephanie Dickinson, Doug Dorph, Tim Macaluso, Richard Fein, Paul Wuensche, Dell Lemmon, Tom Hunley, Angela Schmidt, Robert Clinton, Paul Schaeffer, Joyce (Chunyu) Wang and many others. For the first time, we have a single artist whose work adorns these pages. Jack Pierson’s nakedly gorgeous and varied art unifies all of Mudfish so that it reads like a single poem, a moment’s thought.
Stacy Spencer, the winner of the 18th poetry prize judged by Vijay Seshadri and the two honorable mentions, Elisabeth Murawski and Ann Robinson set a standard of excellence from which there is no decline. From first to last the voices touch you with their intimate revelations. You read one poem and think, ‘yes, this is what poetry is,’ and then you read the next, and think, ‘no, this is what poetry is,’ and you are right every time. Ann Robinson writes: “What a beautiful book. Starting with the cover. The layout, the poems. All. I am so proud to be in it. I was especially taken by the last poem, haunting and beautiful, full of what we know and don’t know, down to the bone.”
“’I had to go to the hospital to give birth,’ the poet states. When the book emerges, it is wild. The Polish Dream Machine is marked by the incredible candor Richard Fein is famous for. He tells us his life, what others bore, and with eloquence and wit defeats the loneliness of old age.”
“The poems from Jill Hoffman’s new book Kimono with Young Girl Sleeves talk about difficult subjects – aging, death, the loss of loved ones. But they do it with honesty and the audacity of youth. The fearlessness of her work makes it relevant and very much alive.” – Anna Halberstadt, Vilnius Diary
“In Jill Hoffman’s irresistible Stoned, the poet Maud Diamond not only indulges in reefer madness in her Beresford bathroom, but takes a much younger live-in lover, a handsome Russian (would-be-famous) artist, to the horror of her precocious children. An explosive triangle, by turns hilarious and heartbreaking, brilliantly drawn with outsized characters worthy of Dickens, lavish imagery, and impeccable comedic timing. Hoffman has written a book so poignant and pleasurable, like a crème brûlée for the eyes, you’ll read it again and again. And yet for all its seeming decadence there is a purity here like a fawn running into the water.” – Stephanie Emily Dickinson, Razor Wire Wilderness
