Anthony Rainone's Introduction to The Lineup 3

Author and New York Editor for Crimespree Magazine Anthony Rainone has worked on The Lineup since its formative stage in 2007. Anthony decided make Issue 3 his last as a co-editor, but today he's blogged his introduction to Issue 3:

The Lineup Issue Number 3 is a robust slice of life distilled by some of the best crime poets in the game today. This is poetry at its best, bringing the reader into terrain that is at turns sobering, horrifying, enlightening and always tinged with a crime element.

And crime poetry isn’t afraid to take that slice deeper than skin level. It eviscerates muscle and bone and bores down to the spaces inside our souls wherein everything lurks.

The Lineup 3 is about revealing secrets, as does Amy MacLennan’s prowler in “Prowling.” Yet, it’s also about our fears and about our perhaps longing for a slightly darker way of life. Poetry — crime poetry — frees us to explore the deranged and dangerous in ways only writers can. The human desires and frailties displayed in this issue cross cultures and countries, from Henry Chang’s Chinese deliveryman in “Takeout” to James McGowan’s Irish thugs in “Running for Home.”

The Lineup 3 has the usual suspects too: murderers, victims, and cops. In this issue, you’ll meet police who put up a façade of gallows humor in the blood-glare of perp killers, such as aptly depicted in Sarah Cortez’s “Ride-along.”

And when we’re the guilty party, crime poetry tells us in aching fashion what the recovery from the fall is like — if recovery happens at all. Sometimes crime poetry just plain hits with flash emotions like a jazz riff floating on barroom currents, such as Wallace Stroby’s “Independence Day, 1976.” You can either fill in the narrative of lives rented from the fabric of conventional society, or you can let the colors of poetry wash over you. Sometimes those colors are the rainbow, and sometimes they are only black and blue.

There are so many reasons to read crime poetry. It will tell you about life in astonishing ways. We all either know what it’s like to put our hand to the flame, or have the desire to do so, or to understand the attraction better. The Lineup 3 burns the way with you.

Anthony Rainone
Brooklyn, NY
January 2010

Thanks for everything, Anthony.

We're on Twitter

This is our one-stop informative post letting Twitter users know about The Lineup: Poems on Crime.

Our annual print journal debuted in July 2008, co-edited by Gerald So, Patrick Shawn Bagley, Richie Narvaez, and Anthony Rainone as Poetic Justice Press. Our third issue, co-edited by Houston police officer poet Sarah Cortez, goes on sale April 1, 2010, and next year's issue will be co-edited by Reed Farrel Coleman.

The cover image, retail price, and contributors for each issue are listed in the sidebar. Learn more about our contributors here.

We're especially interested in reaching independent bookstores on Twitter with this post. Bookstores that buy copies of The Lineup receive a 50% discount on the cover price. There is no minimum order, and I cover shipping and any sales tax. E-mail g_so AT yahoo DOT com to discuss.

The Lineup is currently carried by Murder By the Book (Houston, TX), Once Upon a Crime (Minneapolis, MN), and The Mysterious Bookshop (New York, NY).

For up-to-the-minute updates on The Lineup, follow Poetic Justice Press on Twitter.

Issue 2 Introduction

Outgoing co-editor Patrick Shawn Bagley has reprinted his introduction to The Lineup #2 on his blog:

What does poetry have to do with crime?

Almost a year after the first volume of The Lineup: Poems on Crime was published, and two or three years since Anthony Rainone’s article on noir poetry appeared in Mystery Scene Magazine, I still hear that same question. The people who seem most bewildered by the notion tend to be fans of mystery and crime prose. I suspect their last exposure to poetry came in high school, where they were likely forced to read odes to various sorts of classical pottery, sonnets comparing summer days to dark ladies and verse after verse about tasting liquor never brewed, mending walls or daring to disturb the universe.

So what does poetry have to do with crime?

Poets do not ask that question.

People for whom poetry is a vital part of their reading life do not ask that question.

They do not need to. One cannot separate the medium’s affinity for what Czeslaw Milosz called “luminous things” from its need to examine the darker side of nature, society and the self. American poets have long dealt with the consequences of criminal acts. For a mere handful of examples, track down Claude McKay’s “The Lynching” (1920), Robert Hayden’s “Night, Death, Mississippi” (1966), C.K. Williams’ “Hood” (1969), Ai’s “Child Beater” (1973) or Amy Uyematsu’s “Ten Million Flames of Los Angeles” (1998). With his 1968 poem “Hard Rock Returns to Prison from the Hospital for the Criminal Insane,” Etheridge Knight accomplished in just six stanzas something that took Ken Kesey an entire novel.

Weldon Kees’ “Crime Club” (1947) screamed “that nothing can be solved.” So why do we write crime fiction, let alone crime poetry? One may as well ask why we write—or read—anything at all. We do it in an attempt to understand. We do it to find some kind of meaning in events that all too often leave victims, perpetrators and everyone around them damaged or destroyed.

The poems in this volume of The Lineup carry that tradition forward. In the following pages, you will find prison guards, losers heading for the final fall, burned out detectives, victims of sexual abuse, victims of random violence, shoplifters, rubberneckers and people who slide into crime as their only remaining means of survival. Here you will find proof beyond any reasonable doubt of poetry’s relevance to modern life.

Any questions?

Patrick Shawn Bagley
Madison, Maine
March 2009

Once again I thank Patrick for helping make The Lineup a reality, and wish him the best with his novel and future endeavors.

Introduction

Before I ever thought to write poetry, I was a fan, editor, and writer of crime fiction. I especially enjoy how every paragraph, every sentence, every word has purpose: to plant clues, reveal character, move toward resolution.

I've come to appreciate the same purpose in poetry and have learned there are some moments, some images poetry captures much better than prose.

In September 2007, knowing of my poetry and my work as Fiction Editor for The Thrilling Detective Web Site, Alex Echevarria Roman wrote me suggesting an anthology of crime-themed poems. I told him I'd bring the idea up to a handful of poets I knew with hardboiled and noir sensibilities. I started with Anthony Rainone, who wrote "Raven in a Trenchcoat: Hardboiled and Noir Poetry" for Mystery Scene Magazine, and Maine writer Patrick Shawn Bagley, who was featured in the article. I then enlisted the help of Richie Narvaez, founder of The Journal of Asinine Poetry, and the project grew from there.

I'd like to thank Richie, Patrick, and Anthony for helping assemble The Lineup, and everyone who accepted our invitation to contribute. We hope both fiction and poetry readers enjoy.

This companion blog will feature contributor bios, insights from Lineup contributors, and updates on their activities. Feel free to comment.