"The featured poet this time around in this one-poet-per-issue zine is deservedly Nortonized language poet, Ann Lauterbach, with twelve jump-cut, surrealistic poems that start with a 'Harmony Clown/ from his seat on the shelf before Is,' or situated in some kind of Ur (also mentioned here) of pre-perceptual imagination. 'Is this field's dementia, its prow?' the poet asks. Next comes a strangely vivid list of situations and their colors--having 'no boots to hike thru Jerusalem,' for instance, 'would be Black.' Blake, Rilke, Stevens, Roethke and more."

Here's another review of mine I want to quote from so I can claim to have reviewed a review of a review. It's about Mike Halchin's zine, Bleeding Velvet Octopus, which consists of "around 50 capsule reviews by editor Mike Halchin of (1) music, (2) zines/comix and (3) books/chaps. Halchin is usually informative in a breezy way. Here's a sample line, about a Dave Alvin chap with a title too long to quote here: 'Poems that hit across deserts, highways, small towns, relationships on their way to a hearse, and other intense such adventures.' Of interest to zine- publishers is that Halchin sells ads to his zine and--from his list of rates--seems to have made $65 from them this ish, which should have been enough to pay for its publication. (And the ads are all about worthwhile otherstream stuff, so definitely do not detract from the zine.)"

Among the other reviews in the issue is one about Antenym, which reviewer Jake Berry describes as "An excellent collection of poetry that seems to come out of the Language school, yet follows no approach absolutely. The poets' names are given in the table of contents yet not on the page, which encourages the reader to see the work for what it is rather than who it is by. In that spirit, this sample:

I singled out this review not only as one more sample of Taproot reviewing but to call attention to one of the dozens of worthwhile zines of the 115 or so reviewed here that I was unfamiliar with. 143 chapbooks are also reviewed. And the material covered goes, in editor Luigi-Bob Drake's words, "from punk to pomo to LANGUAGE to dada to visual to even some pretty normal stuff." I consider it near-final proof of the wretched state of contemporary American Poetry, in spite of what the hype artists on PBS and elsewhere proclaim, that Taproot still has less than a hundred subscribers.

A second significant virtue of Taproot is its concern with not just printed poetry but with poetry on the net, and on video- and audiotapes. Berry's review, for instance, also includes the e-mail address of Steve Carll, the editor of Antenym, and the website from which one can bring up back issues of his zine.

My main reason for quoting Berry's review, though, was to call attention to the wonderfully misused language of "these ripped oranged stuffed with hurry," and the rest of the poem it's from. Andy di Michele is equally adept at quoting, giving us Laura Moriarty's "ordinary red precedes! imaginary yellow follows" and Rosemarie Waldrop's "Milk weeds my thoughts" from Avec, #10.

Outside its reviews Taproot more prominently displays a number of full excerpts from books and zines reviewed. Among them is a fascinatingly infra-verbal work from Bullhead, #4 by Joe Napora, complete with a fine accompanying illustration by Pati Scobey. In his poem Napora rearranges "heart" through "heat" and the like to "head," which, he observes, (is) "too near to dead; then he precedes to the following magical juggle of the "each" in "reach": "love we know/ within/ reach// each/ ache/ is fire".

Before leaving Taproot (far too soon), I want to praise one more characteristic of it, its remarkable stable of reviewers. Among the almost 30 in it are Karl Kempton, John M. Bennett, Ben Friedlander, A.L. Nielson, Karl Young, Nico Vassilakis, Cheryl Townsend, Ann Erickson, Peter Ganick, and on and on. So it's a great place to meet superior poets from all schools in prose.