If You Only Knew

Appearing in the webzine BEAT to a PULP this week is the wry story "If You Only Knew" by Lineup #4 contributor John Stickney, inspired by fellow contributor Mary Christine Delea's poem, "If You Only Knew How Easy It Is To Break Into My House".

In February, BEAT to a PULP editor David Cranmer posted The Lineup #4's first review. In May, he hosted BEAT to a PULP's first-ever week of poetry, featuring poems by Frederick Zackel, Gerald So, and Keith Snyder.

Sample Poems

Links to some poems that first appeared or were reprinted in The Lineup (Issue number in parentheses):

Patrick Shawn Bagley, "110 M.P.H. in a Stolen Pickup" (1)
David Corbett, "Bargain" (4)
Sarah Cortez, "Serial Killer" (3)
Anne Frasier, "Home" (3)
H. Palmer Hall, "The Collector" (4)
Peter Meinke, "What Wild-Eyed Murderer" (4)
Carol Novack, "Willie" (2)
Gerald So, "Witness Protection" (1)
Gerald So, "Mickey Spillane" (1)
John Stickney, "Creation" (4)
Wallace Stroby, "Independence Day, 1976" (3)
Charles Harper Webb, "Prayer for The Man Who Mugged My Father, 72" (4)

Visit our Books section to find or purchase The Lineup.

Peter Rozovsky on "Creation"

Detectives Beyond Borders' Peter Rozovsky highlights John Stickney's "Creation" for the fourth stop on the So Dark For April blog tour. Peter's entry concludes:

No one saves the world in these poems, no one takes over an entire town, knocks over a bank, terrorizes a city, or slaughters a classroom full of students. That would be too easy; that stuff is for the newspapers. These poems are about small crimes or about the quiet, intimate moments before and after big ones. Or rather, they remind us that for those most intimately involved — victims, perpetrators, survivors, a son who prays for vengeance on the man who mugged his father — any crime can radically alter the world. There are no small crimes.

John Stickney

John Stickney lives and writes in Cleveland, Ohio. His collection of prose and poems, These American Moments, is available from Burning Press.