The Endicott Review Spring 2012

This is an edict from our Puritan reviewer Dennis Daley regarding The Endicott Review Spring 2012 edition :)

The Endicott Review

Spring 2012

Volume 29, Issue 1

Beverly, MA

Review by Dennis Daly

What is this you’ve put in my hands, Palfrey?  Have you no sense. My name, Endicott, defiled in this abomination of a magazine. Let our Puritan band discover the followers of these mountebanks and mirth counterfeiters.  Every copy of this Endicott Review must burn. See to it.

But hold, let us determine punishment now. I want the editor to swing for this veritable maypole of perfidiousness. Just paging through it now I read of mirth and alcohol and dancing and masques and bright colors and whispers of heathen sex: all this from an undergraduate journal that has been loosed upon our world by its faculty advisors.

What say you? There is no editor, only an editorial board. Then let us pick four of the most deserving as our scape goats. The one called the Wolf King must die tonight. His very alias denotes him as the Lord of Misrule. In his poem, Who Am I/Enigma, he says,

For who am I?

Am I a great and noble leader

Am I a wise and intelligent scholar

Am I a strong and strapping Adonis

Am I a kind soul

Or a despicable villain…

Clearly we have a ringleader here. There are others.

Hadley St. Clair consorts with evil doers and satanic manifestations.  Consider these lines written by her,

The man who taught me

how to write poetry

talks to wolves and cats,

wears tuxedo jackets and speaks

fluent jazz.

Jess Richard anthropomorphizes crows and is delusional. She’s lost to sin and Beelzebub. She writes,

Crows

he told us

they recognize faces.

In a prose poem entitled Drunk Poet Society, Larissa Burgess contemplates a dissolute life. She says,

…I’m thinking about becoming a drunk. Maybe I cant be a

great alcoholic like Bukowski or Fitzgerald or Plath. But I’ll write short, sad poems about

the things I’ve tried and failed..

Good ancient Palfrey, set up the gallows for all of the aforementioned editors. Henceforth editors at The Endicott Review will think twice about their chosen subjects and the awful responsibility they bear creating out of nothing a true literary magazine with expectant and zealous votaries.

Who else dawdles their precious time with demons and beasts giving scandal and ruining souls? Ronnie Tuscano admits that there is

… a war that rages in my soul

fought between two great creatures

The wolf and the tiger

a creature of the night against one of the day…

He cleverly creates ambivalence here and thus deserves three days in the stocks. Arrest him.

Tyler Golec in his affecting poem entitled A Silent Song mourns loneliness and need and praises youth and music and drunken rapture as a sanctuary. More pagan delusions! He says,

Girls sway drunkenly as they enjoy youth

Long youthful legs shown off, breasts left partially bare

The night whispers sex from full young lips

And you listen to the whispers as you get stoned…

Twenty lashes and perhaps Tyler will appreciate our solemn quietude.

Luke Salisbury’s piece, Fragmentation, 1960 portrays the depth and sensitivity of his thirteen year old persona, listening to the drunken words of hardened adults, and there lies the problem. His prose is too pensive, too deft for our new world of stark sainthood. He describes the breakup of the parents’ marriage as a force of nature, cruel and unstoppable. This prompter of internal life and an apparent friend of the magazine must be stopped. His unacceptable artistry demands forty lashes.  

In the deep dusk of the forest Jason L. Roberts obviously cavorts with practitioners of the black arts. In his poem, Prehistoric Love, he confesses,

Velociraptor of mine

Claw me to shreds

Pick out my fantasies and dreams and stomp on them

I am yours to command for you are my lord

My savior…

Not less than twenty-five lashes.

Zvi A. Sesling, a friend of the magazine, commits the unforgivable crime of minimizing death and the evil ones. He speaks of the “broken frame of life” with authority as if he knows something in poetry too profound to tell in plain language.  He says,

Death does not steal them

From us

They hide waiting for us to

Join them

The eternal smile permanent…

This poet worries me: forty lashes. And lay them on heavily!

In her poem, Anywhere But Here, Meghan Perkins admits devil worship. She says,

I want to take a running leap off a cliff

and dissipate into smoke,

drifting into the stratosphere,

returning to dance on the face of the moon,

Arrest the woman and jail her. We will provide a fair trial before we hang her.

We have a true outrage by poet and friend of the magazine, Doug Holder. The table of contents places his poem, It’s Like Putting Lipstick On A Pig, on page 32. But it is not there. They smeared it instead on page 26. Concealment will not work, however. Righteousness uncovers licentiousness wherever it hides. This poem is a mockery of all that we hold dear. Holder spews,    

When she pouts

put the red on her

porcine lips

A Red Flag around her mouth

because no make-up

will disguise the genuine

whine and plea of

her insistent oink…

Holder makes us, a congregation of saints, wallow in the human condition. He deserves both thirty lashes and the stocks and then you will secure a signed confession of his wizardry. Pile rocks on his naked chest if necessary.  When you are finished with him, good Palfrey, bring him to Salem before the Great and General Court in shackles and we will think more on this. The man is another Thomas Morton and not fit to be in our colony.

The art work throughout this magazine reeks of deviltry: from the expressive paintings of Arielle Matthews to the magnetic photograph of mother and child by Brittany Mellon. The artist responsible for the idolatrous cover must be pulled from his or her anonymity and justice will again be meted out, fairly, of course.

Prepare the fire, Palfrey, the Spring 2012 issue must not survive this night.