Journal Review: Blazevox

BlazeVox literary magazine is listed with Poets and Writers and is the only magazine that I have yet to come across that actually provides author feedback although I’m sure there are more out there it just seems almost a nice novelty. They accept simultaneous submissions in poetry, fiction, experimental and literary reviews and have a small publishing press that produces ebooks and chapbooks. I even found a short movie produced by one of their editors, Geoffrey Gatza, in the last issue of a man ( I cannot say for sure if this was Geoffrey himself) smoking a bowl , listening to classical music, and obsessively moving around scissors, tape, pen and Kenneth Goldsmith’s book “Day”. The climax for me was when he finally begins to cut apart “Day” with a sharpie tool and a ruler.
One sign of the ‘experimental’ is in their publishing poetry by artists such as Christina Manweller’s poems which include interesting language, squiggles, brackets, em dashes and ampersands along with sections of poems whose lines consist of one to two words. Heather Fowler’s poem “Love Child” reads more like a 12 page short story than prose in its style rendering the speaker’s parents meeting and their love relationship.
BlazeVox is even bold enough to include rhyming poems whereas many mags shun them like a girl in striped tights. April A’s two abab rhyme scheme poems “The Voice of Despair” and “Nothing Else Counts” seem to struggle for a more complex form.
BlazeVox does boast an impressive array of chapbooks, one of which is Jennifer J. Thompson’s Naming God where she goes anywhere from variations on villanelles to prevailing themes of flowers and the sensual power play between the sexes and dialectic from the biblical to VanGogh. One line I cherish from her collection is found in the final poem, “I Am Certain That This Is My First Love Poem,” Simplicity can be a virtue, but unrelieved simplicity/begins to seem simple. This sort of insight, raw humor and wit is found throughout the work.
Another of their highlighted authors, Joe Milford has multiple volumes published Volume 1 of which is titled, Cracked Altimeter and shows a playfulness of language and rhyme in the poems “maybe in me” and in “I invite you into me.” In the 23 section poem “Nomad’s rags” some of the complexity of his lines and language can be seen: born postmodern, abortion post-partum/I, a speaking morgue of a thousand axioms skinned/seasoned with the need to icon, carrying the pelts/ of culture-killed myths, and I will deliver/ this unidentified object to you, try to/ figure it out, try to fly it. And later within the same poem the spirit of experimentation which becomes more recognizable as integral to getting published here surfaces: I am an anarchanachronometricist---/I made this word up, this occupation/ out-of-context with timelines.
BlazeVox currently discovered it is deficient in their publishing and is now in the process of “promoting the work of women who are courageous, innovative, definition defying writers.” And all BlazeVox says you need to do to meet their criteria is not produce work that “sucks,” I suppose one author review and you will know if you are in that number or not. Email submissions to: editor@blazevox.org