Touch The Donkey #10 reviewed in Broken Pencil

Touch the Donkey #10 is reviewed by Scott Bryson in Broken Pencil (issue #5 was reviewed here, and the first issue reviewed here). Thanks much! You can see the original review here. He writes:

This tenth issue of Touch the Donkey — editor rob mclennan’s ongoing attempt to “engage with more experimental and avant-garde poetry” — presents a noticeably diverse group, both in substance and style.

Meredith Quartermain recounts a painful breast exam. Renée Sarojini Saklikar contributes a number of enigmatic, bee-centric poems excerpted from thecanadaproject, her “life-long poem chronicle about place, identity, language.” Shane Rhodes supplies poems built from phrases found in the journals of nautical expeditions. Luke Kennard spits out cascading, verbose verses that often read like spoken-word rants: “The realization fell like trochees, like a burlap sack of tchotchkes.”

The most rewarding entries in this collection come from Mathew Timmons. His first submission is two and a half pages of text that reads like the transcript of a yoga instructor’s motivational speeches. His second is a poem that finds innumerable ways to describe sundresses being shopped for online: “Detect those charismatic despicable sundresses online… Gravy those indomitable pitiful sundresses online.” Each line of this poem is capped with a curious four-digit code, which may conceal some deeper meaning, should you care to try and crack it, for example: “fRhC; Zlzk; xHmr.”

Though there’s no particular mood or theme that ties this issue’s poems together, they consistently find a satisfying balance between modernity and mystery.

Touch the Donkey #1 reviewed in Broken Pencil #67

Touch the Donkey #1 is reviewed by Scott Bryson in Broken Pencil #67. He writes:

[…]

The aforementioned sonnets aside – they’re expertly crafted by Camille Martin – several lucid and honest prose entries stand out, in this collection. Across two verses, Hailey Higdon discusses how she has “come to an agreement” with her dog regarding its need to be walked and her reluctance to participate, as she suffers through anxiety (or perhaps agoraphobia). In “Distraction,” Norma Cole examines a variety of memories that hint at the power of silence and absence, and the creativity born from incomplete knowledge.

There’s a consistently bleak – yet oddly gratifying – atmosphere surrounding the majority of these works. Pattie McCarthy sums it up in a way that’s both enigmatic and pitiable, in one of several poems titled “wifthing” (which deal with the history of the wife): “the shape of my midlife crisis is daniel radcliffe.”