ISSUE 10

ISSUE #10

Editors note:

This is Brave New Word Magazine Issue 10. Wow! What can I say - it was a long road. Originally, I have planned to post Issue 10 almost immediately after dropping the second part of Issue 9 - in the early April. But then the reality kicked in. I had no time to fully commit to composing an issue due to intense workload.

And there was also another significant problem - extremely lacking submissions. The primary reason for a significant delay in-between issues 9 and 10 was lack of good stuff. Plain and simple. I just couldn't find anything fitting for BNW for quite a while. And since I didn't wanted to make a passable issue - i was waiting for the good stuff to be submitted. Eventually, it paid off. But it was a long time coming.

At one point, I was considering ghostwriting some of the stuff to fill the gaps. For the first time since I have started this magazine, i was experiencing such thing. It was frustrating and disappointing. When I posted a call for submissions over several groups on Facebook and Reddit - I was expecting a lot of things to happen. I was ready for an endless stream of insults and bullshit as it usually happened immediately after placing the calls, but this time it was strangely civil - every submitter was polite and generous.

However, for some reason, the majority of the submissions were missing the point of the magazine. As if the submission guidelines were too ambiguous and unclear. And it was a catastrophe. Instead of anything even remotely resembling an experimental effort I was getting more and more of some insipid, vapid, milquetoast bazoo that was already all over the internet.

Here's the thing - Brave New Word is about pushing boundaries, trying something new - not just a place where you can dump your shit.

And then, when I thought the worst was behind - more fun had happened. In April I had an email bombing episode. Over the course of 24 hours, I've received over a thousand letters of unknown origins.

None of them were identified as spam, so all this goodness went straight to my inbox. I felt dumbfounded when I saw it in the morning. It felt surreal. The letters were strange but adequate. It wasn't exactly a spam - the messages were clearly composed by some advanced text generator. They made sense, there were no malicious links or some other shady stuff - just some very generic text that flew over the radar.

There were things like "hello, how are you?" and then some retelling of some joke or recap of some Westworld episode in very verbose language. It was creepy at times but nothing special. Even the email addresses were resembling legitimate email addresses - most of them were hosted on Yahoo, AOL, Zoho, and ProtonMail. Someone put an effort in this attack.

The challenge was that I had no way to determine which letter was which by a preview. It wasn't effective enough - I saw stuff but it could've been a letter from a real person. The problem was that there were real letters lost in-between and I didn't wanted to dispose them too. And so I was forced go through this horde of letters one by one. It took me almost two months to clear the mess. Long story short - it was unmemorable.

But in the end, it was totally worth it. There was a lot of good stuff in-between the bad letters. These pieces formed a backbone of this issue. After a while, it finally started to come together and so here it is.

Enjoy!

***

Table of Contents:

• Alyssa Trivett - Two poems
• Mike Busam - Ten Pieces
• Heller Levinson - Three Poems
• Arnold McBay - Two Code Gifs
• Michael Orr - Two Spoon Pieces
• David Subacchi - Two poems
• Billy Mavreas - Four visual pieces
• Jonathan Mulcahy-King - Four poems
• Rrose Selaby - Two Collages
• Rus Khomutoff - Five poems
• Clay Thistleton - One found poem
• Ira Lightman - Six poems
• Michael McAloran - Nowhereon Sequence 5

Rrose Selaby - Two Pieces

Rrose Selaby was born in Cordoba (Spain) in 1980. In the dark since then. Got a Degree in Art History. Was considering researching either on Carousels or Rhinoceros.

"I always loved cutting out papers. I keep them in envelopes and in a tin box that my brother gave me. Each time that I open it, I remember my grandmother Dolores, who kept a hundred of holy cards in a shoebox in order to pray with them every day."

Michael Mc Aloran - Nowhereon Sequence 5

Michael Mc Aloran was Belfast born, (1976). He is the author of a number of collections of poetry, prose poetry, poetic aphorisms and prose, including 'Attributes', (Desperanto, NY, 2011), 'The Non Herein' & ‘Of Dead Silences’ (Lapwing Publications, 2011/ 2013), 'Of the Nothing Of’, 'The Zero Eye', 'The Bled Sun', 'In Damage Seasons', (Oneiros Books (U.K)--2013/ 14); 'Code #4 Texts', a collaboration with Aad de Gids, was also published in 2014 by Oneiros. Two further collections, 'Un-Sight/ Un-Sound (delirium X.)’ & 'The Banality of Else' were both published by gnOme books (2014). 'EchoNone' was also released 2015 by Oneiros Books. Black Editions Press also released 'Untitled #2' & '[unspoken]' in 2016, and 'longshadowfall' was published by Editions du Cygne (FR) in 2017. 'Catascope', was also published by Editions du Cygne early in 2018, and two further projects, 'the black vault' & 'all null having', are now published by VoidFront Press...

Ira Lightman - Six Poems

Ira Lightman does a few books and public art and broadcasting and plagiarism sleuthing

Clay Thistleton - One (found) poem

Clay Thistleton has taught creative writing and literary studies in universities, community colleges and not-for-profit organisations for almost two decades. He is the author of Gef the Talking Mongoose and Other ... Poems (Blart Books, in press): a collection of found poetry that investigates the phenomenon of ghosts and poltergeists that have the ability to speak or write.  His current project, Never Mind the Saucers, examines documented instances of alien-human sexual contact. Along with his son Dylan, Clay lives in New South Wales, Australia with a fluctuating number of feral cats.

Alyssa Trivett - Two poems

Alyssa Trivett is a wandering soul from the Midwest. When not working two jobs, she listens to music and scrawls lines on the back of gas station receipts. Her work has appeared in VerseWrights, In Between Hangovers, and recently at Otoliths and Five 2 One.

Rus Khomutoff - Five Poems

Rus Khomutoff is a neo surrealist language poet based in Brooklyn, NY. His poetry has been featured in Erbacce, Poethead, Occulum, Fifth Day Journal and Former People Journal. Last year he self published an ebook Immaculate Days. You can find him on twitter @rusdaboss

Jonathan Mulcahy-King - Four poems

‘Extracts from the Mirai Botnet Source Code’ by J. Mulcahy-King (2018) is taken from the forthcoming Unstructions For Instance with Martin Abrams

Billy Mavreas - Four visual pieces

Billy Mavreas makes comics, collage, visual poetry in Montreal, Quebec. 

He operates out of his art space, Monastiraki, a repository of paper scraps, prints, zines, ephemera and local/found art.

David Subacchi - Two Poems

David Subacchi lives in Wales (UK) where he was born of Italian roots. He studied at the University of Liverpool. He has four published collections of his English Language poetry and one in Welsh.

You can find out more about David at

https://www.writeoutloud.net/profiles/davidsubacchi

Michael Orr - Two Spoon Pieces

Michael Orr is an Artist based out of Atlanta GA USA. He works primarily with ink, handmade and found rubber stamps, used packaging and miscellaneous bric-a-brac to compose abstract shapes, stories and compositions. Michael Orr would never refer to himself as a poet. Michael Orr has yet to be discovered by the media.”

Arnold McBay - Two Code Gifs

Arnold McBay is a mixed-media visual artist and a sessional art instructor at Brock University. Exhibiting since 1988 he has been the recipient of numerous awards and grants and has work in private and public collections across North America. Recent projects include: a collaborative project with Gregory Betts (Signs of our Discontent: the textures of our solitude) mounted at the In the Soil Festival in St. Catharines and recent exhibitions, a chapbook with Gregory Betts featuring the Signs of our Discontent project (published by Above/Ground Press, Ottawa) as well as exhibits at the John B. Aird Gallery in Toronto and Grimsby Public Art Gallery in Grimsby, Ontario. He is also a member of the St. Catharines based improvisational noise/sound band TZT. He is represented by Thielsen Galleries of London, ON.

Heller Levinson - Three Poems

Heller Levinson’s books include LinguaQuake,tenebraed, Wrack Lariat, from stone this running, Smelling Mary, and Toxicity: Poems of the Coconut Vulva. Levinson’s poems and writings have appeared in hundreds of journals and literary outlets around the world. The originator of Hinge Theory, he lives in New York where he studies animal behavior.

Mike Busam - Ten Pieces

Mike Busam was born in the state of Ohio in 1968 and have never left. Currently works for the Lane Library Bookmobile & Outreach Services department in Hamilton, Ohio. Spends most days at grade schools (which is a lot of fun). 

He says: "I aim to use materials that I have at hand and within reach--recycled newspaper (older ones have interesting fonts and design elements), magazines, used guitar strings, leaves, dead insects, etc. Lately, I've been using letter stamps to make one-off pieces, and that's been fun. I try to work within my limited abilities as best as I can, and usually the resulting mistakes and miscues are far more interesting than my usually serious original intentions."

Announcing Issue 10

BRAVE NEW WORD WILL RETURN ON May 28.

ISSUE LINE-UP:

• Alyssa Trivett
• Mike Busam
• Rrose Selaby
• Heller Levinson
• Arnold McBay
• Michael Orr
• David Subacchi
• Billy Mavreas
• Jonathan Mulachy-King
• Rus Khomutoff
• Clay Thistleton
• Ira Lightman
• Michael McAloran