Lost & Found Times, #37: Al 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 Bennettian lines like, "Christ, you river rubes make me think of napkins milking stains to sneeze a thought twat at master slurping . . ." At the other end of the aesthetic specturm are a number of 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.

Skinny Chest is a breezy new zine by mostly young Southern Californians (it would appear). Its contents are mostly reviews and/or impressions of or from pop musicians, and first person short stories in conventional prose. One of the latter is a taut description by Larry Tomayasu of a lower-class prostitute (I think) who believes "Sylvia Plath and Emily Dickinson were like me." The longest story in the magazine, Patrick Lubow's "What Happened," jumps back and forth between the wandery streams of consciousness of a twenty-something yo-yo out in his car and a potheaded pedestrian he runs over, or so the story suggests but doesn't state. A little heavy-handedly Mrs. Dallowayish, but not bad.

I've decided to cover two items by Patrick Mullins because of their small size. One, Patrick Mullins Reviews John M. Bennett, consists of just 4 post-cards. Each 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.

Mullins's other piece is an 8-pager called Sleep. A utilitarian epigraph, "We must work hard in order to sleep better, deeper and more dreamlessly" precedes a six-page visiocollagic sequence (i.e., unfused mixtures of pictures and texts) that in a decidedly un-utilitarian fashion breaks modern technology--represented here by objects like a telescope, a movie projector, telephone poles, a watch, and abstract texts such as reference manuals--into fragments of sleep, not dreamless.

Semiautomatic, #4, is 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).

The source of the epigraphs Tim Allen uses for his poetry collection, Texts for a Holy Saturday, Blake, Hejinian and Brunuel, neatly situate his work. The first four stanzas of his "hieratic" exemplify his Blakijineul zip, wit and quirkiness: "What to think?/ Think poetry.// Undetermined?/ Think momentum.// Insoluble?/ Think.// Inconsolable?/ Thinky fish." Elsewhere he writes, "destroy the imagination/ (and) then celebrate it"--his parentheses. Ooccasionally, he's unusually deft infra-verbally as with "between diction/ aries," a wonderful sudden opposition of careful communication and War--but also with a suggestion of aeries . . . I also liked "meteorligically."

That's it till the next time.