Here are some more old never-published micro-reviews:

Joshua Saul Beckman: At the News of your Death--Permeable Press, 47 Noe Street, #4, San Francisco CA 94114-1017. 36 pp., $3. Three poems including a simple-worded free verse elegy in 9 stanzas, each moving from "At the news of your death" to various surrealities (e.g., a giant wave that "sat his big gray body down/ next to the few people left/ who hadn't run away in fear"; phone company computers' going on strike and being replaced by people; certain trees' deciding to drop their leaves annually in spring till the deceased returns) that slowly build a quite affecting mood. Also a poem gently against explaining "everything in poetry"--or relationships--with a footnote recommending standing "close with each hand on the other's arms," moving "them up and down in a warming motion" while repeating 'It is heavy-handed' and 'It is unfair.'"

O!!Zone (#16, Spring 1995), 1266 Fountain View Dr., Houston TX 7057. 60 pp., $5. Some s-m-tinged representational fotos by Marc Fily of France of partially-dressed prostitutes provide this issue's sharpest jut--except for a multi-representational collage by Guy Beining I wish had been reproduced larger that features a Vietnamese (I think) prostitute (I think). Of the texts a stand-out is Glenn Russell's surrealistic prose short, "The Dark Elf," concerning a mirror that really gives mirror-images--of dicklessness as an erection, for instance. The poetry is generally well-crafted and conventional, and not usually too memorable--though Charles H. Webb's following slam of the standard post-Vietnam life of the average American male is pretty memorable:

                How Much Money Would It Take

                to make you gulp fat black slug? Pat a black-widow?
                Eat a dog-turd? Lick a public restroom clean?
                Flip off a big, hairy Hells Angel? Amputate
                your own finger? Your own hand? Kiss Gloria Rottblatt?
                Trade disks with her? Jump off a mile-high bridge?
                Walk a tightrope over sharks? Live in a coffin for a week?
                With a corpse? Shoot your best friend? Your mom and dad?

The rest of it continues to ask how much money it would take to spend thirteen plus years in school, and Sundays in church "praising a God you never see, who loves you,/ preachers say, but who seems crabby all the time,/ and lets you get drafted," etc., and--three or four stanzas later--to tell your kids when they "finally stop jeering/ and ask what they should do about their lives,/ . . . to do more or less the same as you?"

Lost & Found Times (#37, November 1996), Luna Bisonte Prods, 137 Leland Ave., Columbus OH 43214. 56 pp., $6. Ackerman's in prime form here as "Ralph '$50,000 Party' Delgado" reporting on Ackerman's first meeting with John M. Bennett, an ambulance driver who steals his patients' clothes, then sells them back to them at his house while spouting lines like, "Christ, you river rubes make me think of napkins milking stains to sneeze a thought twat at master slurping . . ." Contraesthetically, the issue boasts numerous Jim Leftwich poems, including a set of textual super-imposings that starts with "bosos" on top of itself in such a way as to suggest "bios," "bosom" and "blossoms." No room to say more about this always alarmingly-off-both-ends-of-the-absurdity/sublimity-continuum circus of a zine.

Patrick Mullins: Patrick Mullins Revises John M. Bennett--231 Elizabeth Street, Athens GA 30601. 4 cards, $1. Each card contains a single line comprised of two or more lines from Bennett (one of them upside-down, and several fading). Our tracks through existence? Life as obliterations? I'm afraid I can't make out enough words to be more specific. There's something worthwhile going on here, though.

Edmund Conti and Wayne Hogan: Eb & Flo, a Writer's Manual--Box 842, Cookeville TN 38503 or 79 Tulip Street, Summit NJ 07901. 52 pp., $6. Light verse and illustrations. Samples: "Work hard,/ writer, and ye shall be/ reworded," by Hogan (in his "Ode to The Editor's Credo"); "If it's irony/ eventually/ it will be rusty," by Conti, from "Oxidation." Lots of amusement here, especially for all us wannabe bigtime writers.

Patrick Mullins: Sleep--231 Elizabeth Street, Athens GA 30601. 8 pp., $1. A utilitarian epigraph: "We must work hard in order to sleep better, deeper and more dreamlessly" precedes six unfused mixtures of pictures and texts that in a decidedly un-utilitarian fashion break modern technology, pictured here by objects like a telescope, a movie projector, telephone poles, a watch, and abstract texts such as "reference presupposes existence" into fragments of sleep, not dreamless.

Semiautomatic (#4, Winter 1996), 231 Elizabeth Street, Athens GA 30601. 16 pp., $2 (cash only). A perfect one-sitting revue of prime burstnorm poetry, mostly pluraesthetic as with Bay Kelley's smeary, carbon-miscopied, mistyped short texts, one funereally sad about "a festive box," another shatteringly capturing the desolation of c(old); and some great textual illumages (visual artworks made up of letters empty of semantic content) by Avelino de Araujo. But Bennett and Murphy have text-only poems here, too, for the segreceptual. (Murphy's "klept emotion" especially yowwed me, putting me in some department store of shoplifted emotion).

Poetry USA (#27, Summer 1996), Fort Mason Center, Building D, San Francisco CA 94123. 32 pp., $3. A long-running, packed poetry-tabloid back after a long absence with Jack Foley no longer editing it and, apparently, no longer cutting-edge. This issue is devoted almost entirely to orthotechnical "Poems of Protest," some of them agit-propically bad, like Kush's full-page "The Song of Capitalism," the stanzas of which repeat the title, then fire off salvoes of repeated words or word-groups like "FIRED FIRED FIRED" or "scared scared anxious tense tense tense tense . . ." But there's good stuff here, too, like the poem by Sharon Dubiago about coming to terms with the hatred of her lover's ex.

New OrleansReview (Vol. 22, No. 1, Spring 1996), Loyola University, New Orleans LA 70118. 128 pp., $6. Jack Foley and Ron Silliman represent burstnorm literature this issue, the latter with prose that begins, "Confused, ants huddle about the box of chocolates for warmth. In an open cauldron (my skull), syntax simmers. Query this." Syntax as chocolate? Foley's piece is all semi-gnostic accumulatively rich injunctions to "describe/"--for example, "describe/ the body is slow/ the mind is slow BUT THE MOUTH". There's much else of value here such as William T. Cotton's laudatory study of Helen Vendler's critical practice that seems mostly valid but fails to address her disregard for all poetry using techniques later than Pound's and Eliot's (unless you count Jorie Graham's "experiments" with line- length).