30 Days of The 5-2 - Day 26: Sea Minor

As you may know, The 5-2: Crime Poetry Weekly has its roots in The Lineup: Poems on Crime. Author, blogger, and poet Nigel Bird discusses Patricia Abbott's "Articulating Space" from The Lineup #3, which was released for Kindle and Nook April 1.

See the full 30 Days of The 5-2 schedule.

Update: The Lineup #3 Ebook

Happy New Year, everyone.

In April, I will be publishing a $2.99 ebook version of The Lineup #3 (2010) for Kindle and Nook, including seventeen of the original nineteen poets' work. Sarah Cortez sold the electronic rights to her poems elsewhere, and Carrie McGath opted not to have her poem reprinted.

The full-content print version is still available for purchase from Lulu.com.

Wallace Stroby on The Lineup

For the twenty-third stop on the So Dark For April blog tour, New Jersey journalist and crime novelist Wallace Stroby looks back on his contribution to last year's Lineup #3 and surveys The Lineup #4.

From James R. Winter

Crime fiction author and reviewer James R. Winter was first to buy The Lineup #3 when it went on sale April 1. On this last day of National Poetry Month, he's blogged a review:

Annually, Gerald So, the fiction editor at Thrilling Detective, heads up a volume of crime-related poetry called The Lineup. As National Poetry Month draws to a close today, I thought I’d take a look at the latest issue.

The Lineup #3 begins strong with co-editor Sarah Cortez’s tale of a ride-along gone wrong. An officer is shot, and his civilian rider is unable to call for help. James W. Hall ponders the women found murdered from time to time, never where they were taken from. And Carrie McGrath wonders if the crimes of men cat-calling her might cause her to commit a crime herself.

It’s Amy McLennan who provides the strongest pair of poems. In “Prowling,” she gets into the head of a burglar who never leaves any sign of his presence, despite not wearing gloves. In “A Life of Vice,” a woman has no regrets over her life of using lovers and drugs, even if she’s reached the end of her rope in a bus station john.

The Lineup is largely blank verse and free verse, which works best for this type of subject matter. It’s poetry that has a spoken feel to it, almost as if it’s reaching toward the poetic prose of some of its writers. This is especially evident with veteran poet and author Reed Farrel Coleman’s effort, “Victim’s Kiss.” Like many of the poets in this volume, their verse reads very much like their prose. It’s a dark eye-opener.

From Jedidiah Ayres

Ayres, who runs the BN.com mystery blog Ransom Notes, mentioned The Lineup 3 on his other blog, Hardboiled Wonderland:

[A] curious publication - The Lineup - poems on crime recently published their third edition featuring the likes of Patti Abbott, Reed Farrel Coleman, James W. Hall and more. I'm not much of a poetry guy, but I've enjoyed reading these, (and having to treat them as prose - sorry poets) little glimpses of crime from all angles. My favorite title in there? Decomposing Women. There are also some really nice cops' eye view of minor mayhem that are nicely put.

From Catfish McDaris

Care of contributor David S. Pointer, McDaris—the popular veteran small press poet and editor—gave a straight-shooting review of The Lineup 3. I've reprinted it below, omitting, with McDaris's permission, the odd comment best understood only after reading the poems:

THE LINEUP Poems On Crime Issue 03 / 2010

Reviewed by Catfish McDaris

The Lineup is a fine collection of [nineteen] punch you in the gut poets. They come at you from so many angles, it takes a second and third reading to catch all the hard lines. The four editors—Gerald So, Sarah Cortez, R. Narvaez, and Anthony Rainone—work together well, choosing crime from every walk of life. The first poem by Sarah Cortez, a Texas cop, hooked and scared me. It was titled "Ride-along", about a young girl doing a beginner’s ride with a seasoned cop. Things go wrong and get violent. My young Latina daughter is doing ride-alongs now in the Latino areas in Milwaukee. This poem disturbed me. The makings of any good read are the amount of emotion evoked.

There’s a whiff of serial killer in The Lineup, but after all the movies and television it, doesn’t seem as gruesome as it should be. Since I now live in the home [state] of Jeffrey Dahmer and Ed Gein, cannibals are like corn candy. Larry D. Thomas’ poems are great...

James W. Hall’s "Decomposing Women" was an episode of C.S.I. Maybe it's me watching too much television and my wife solving all the crimes before me? Michael A. Flanagan’s words were stupendous. Henry Chang's "Takeout (as we roll)" was Chinatown steel right to the heart. [His] "Chasing the dragon," I could relate to, unfortunately. James M. McGowan’s "Running for Home" and "Teenage Sniper" reminded me of what good storytellers Irishmen usually are.

David S. Pointer’s "Certain Methods" brought me back in time to my military service. These words jumped off the page with Semper Fidelis adrenalin[...]Kristine Ong Muslim’s prose poem is sheer terror and bloody frightening.

Anne Frasier’s "Home" is a bit Jack London & Poeish. Amy MacLennan's "A Life of Vice" I could smell the dirt and itch. Wallace Stroby's "Independence Day, 1976" shared a sad dream of reverie.

This a super collection of words about crime. On a scale of 1 to 10, I’d give it a 9. This is my opinion and you know what they say about opinions.


Catfish McDaris
McDar3 AT aol DOT com
http://catfishgringoriver.blogspot.com

[I'd like to comment that James W. Hall's "Decomposing Women" was reprinted with permission and acknowledgment from his collection The Lady from the Dark Green Hills, published in 1976—pre-dating the C.S.I. phenomenon. —Gerald]

From Scott Phillips

The author of The Ice Harvest, The Walkaway, and Cottonwood blogged about The Lineup 3, concluding:

"[T]he poems are pretty badass. If you like hardboiled crime writing, this is right up your sordid, trash-strewn, bloodstained alley."

From Owen Hill

Poet, bookseller, and author of the Clay Blackburn P.I. series:

Crime writers and poets have a deep understanding of what Lorien Niedecker called the condensery. They know how to burn through the fat and get to the heart (and guts) of things, cooking down until only the real, strong stuff remains. Writers who work in both genres are especially adept at this condensing process. We see the results in this issue of The Lineup—an almost painful clarity, and an uncanny understanding of darkness and light, "fragile fiber sailboats on a chintz black sea".^*

^*From "Articulating Space" by Patricia Abbott, p. 36 of The Lineup #3.

From Victor Gischler

I've been a fan of Victor Gischler's work since UglyTown published Gun Monkeys. His second book, Pistol Poets, convinced me if I ever started a crime poetry journal, I should get his opinion. And so I have. On his blog today, Gischler gives his honest take on The Lineup 3:

Gerald So was kind enough to fix me up with with a .pdf copy of THE LINEUP #3 and I have to say I'm impressed. In my opinion, most of the poetry written in the world is utter garbage. When you pick up a Norton Anthology of literature and read some of the classic poems within, you have to understand that each of those gems represents thousands of discarded turds that poets have penned over the centuries. So when I open the pages of The Lineup #3 and see that 75% of the poems within are actually good, I have to say I'm pleasantly surprised. You beat the odds, guys. Congratulations.

Not all the poems hit the mark, and without bothering to name names, I'll simply say that some selections suffer from that age old poetry problem -- prose with line breaks. Taking run-of-the mill sentences and giving them neat little line breaks so you have a narrow column of words skipping down the page does not a poem make. Hey, I'm guilty of this myself. One time, I took a crime "poem" I'd written and took out the line breaks and sold it to Crimestalker Casebook as a short-short piece of fiction. It happens.

But many more of the poems are quite enjoyable. I suppose I could go poem by poem and point out some nice use of language and some vivid imagery I think works pretty well ... but I'm a lazy lazy man. Trust me. It's in there, and you should take a look for yourself. I will say that the James Sallis and James W. Hall poems were among the most memorable. Many of the selections are expertly rendered, yet simultaneously accessible to the reader that might not normally make a habit of reading poetry. Try it.

From Michael Allen Dymmoch

Dymmoch, crime writer and blogger at The Outfit: A Collective of Chicago Crime Writers posted about The Lineup 3 today:

Crime poetry...sounds like an oxymoron. Poetry is refined. And literary. It’s not something usually associated with crime. But “the ultimate economy” is an art form that lends itself surprisingly well to the subject, to the damage crime inflicts, to the emotions crime arouses. We like crime fiction because it deals with the most serious subjects. And it’s dramatic. It plays with our fears, threatens our hopes. It lets us deal with horrifying subjects at a little distance. Poetry does all that too—but more economically. In good poetry, the point is never lost in a forest of verbiage, the plot never wanders. Far more than in prose, each word has to be precisely right, a sniper’s killshot.

Dymmoch went on to cite poems by Jackie Sheeler and Francine Witte, summing up as follows:

The Lineup represents crime from a number of points of view—criminals', cops' and victims'. What’s common to all the poems is the way a story is presented and emotion evoked with an amazing economy of language.

From Steve Weddle

Former English professor, columnist, and current Do Some Damage blogger:

Gerald So and company have put together the next installment in THE LINEUP, a collection of crime poems. This go-round features Patricia Abbott, Reed Farrel Coleman, Anne Frasier and many others wrapping verse around a steel pipe. From police ride-alongs to damp basements, this one has you covered. Oh, and it’ll give you even more reasons to stay out of airport bathrooms. Or airports, at least.