RHINO is a magazine I started liking way back when I was a reviewer for NewPages.com. The voices are often direct, edgy, humorous, dark in an odd way, the language interesting but not punch-drunk.
So, receiving my contributor copy this year of RHINO 2008 made me happy. They published one of my fox-wife poems (“The Note the Fox Wife Leaves Him”) with a tiny mistake that I may have made or may have been made at the copy-edit level. You know the difference between a “–” and a “-” can make a lot of a difference to the meaning of a line, I discovered as I tried to piece together what the word “mind-remembrances” could have meant – then I realized it was supposed to be an – which separated two clauses between “mind” and “remembrances,” and the poem became familiar again.

Notwithstanding my own poem, mind-remembrances and all, there’s a lot of great poetry here. The poem “Why Lot’s Wife Was Turned into a Pillar of Salt,” by Mel Patrell Furman, I thought would be a re-telling of the familiar Biblical tale but ended up a sensuous and melancholic meditation on 9/11:
“For doubting the life that continues after the towers have fallen when plum silk lies in lines of ash on the floor of Neiman’s and whitehot blasts have darkened the extra-virgin oil,
after the laundresses have been martyred, and the manicurists…”
In a similar mood, Ivy Alvarez’ “The Ruin” imagines a lost past…”you shamble beside me/ the jester/ /carrying clementines for eyes…there is a ledge/ with room enough for two//we do not sit.”
Wendy Wisner’s lyric prose poem about a seagull stealing her hamburger on a cold beach ends with the terrific line: “It was winter, a time of hunger.” Oliver de la Paz’ “The Dogs of the Orchard” allows the speaker to commune with wild things. Glenn Shaheen’s amazing poem based on the knock-knock joke form, “From a Hundred and One Hilarious Knock-Knock Jokes,” moves to places you would never guess, and the form allows for expansive, ironic musings: “Orange you glad we live in a society of cheap trinkets? It’s not a bad thing at all to be shown this kind of love.”
Anyway, there are only so many little literary magazines I enjoy every time, and RHINO is one of them. Congrats, editors, on your years of hard work – thanks!