Click through to read the full (super-mega) review of 3RD BED [7, 8, 10, &11]
I feel like I would be repeating myself to review the final four issues of 3RD BED – each one is fantastic, brilliant in its own right, but I would be saying the same for each: wonderful words, beautiful layout, amazingly sad that this journal wasn’t able to continue and simultaneously fortunate that these issues are still available via Derek White and Calamari Press.
So, instead of repeating infinitum, I’ll tackle each of these volumes in short by listing their awe-some contributors, an excerpt of a stellar piece that caught me off-guard, an excerpt from a piece that I knew was going to be amazing and then was, my single favorite sentence from the issue, and an excerpt from a piece that should sell you that particular volume in one-fell swoop.
3RD BED [7]
Contributors:
Steve Gilmartin,Eric Baus, Kira Henehan, Christine Hume, Diane Williams, Andrew Levy, Laylah Ali, Rachel Zucker, Amy Day Wilkinson, Jeffrey Levine, Walter Map, Lisa Pearson, Jeffrey Encke, Matthew Kirby, Laynie Browne, Gary Amdahl, Ryan Murph, Norman Lock, Arielle Greenberg, Anna Joy Springer, Julia Elliott, Michael Burkard, Kathryn Rantala, Keith Driver, Ander Monson, Susan Lander, Nina Shope, Michael Savitz, & T. R. Hull
An excerpt from a stellar piece that caught me off-guard:
from ‘If You Cannot Work the Eskimo Yo-Yo’ by Christine Hume
If you cannot work the Eskimo yo-yo in frigid midnight
air, you must walk around and create a map inside your
muscles. There, a secret heat makes a secret flight, making
air remember birds. Your absurd hands will go to seed.
Only the other day, your pacing made something stop
sleeping; it made nowhere a shook-out place.
An excerpt from a piece that I knew was going to be amazing and then was:
from ‘I, Your Man, Your Man’ by Diane Williams
There I am, I, your man, mixing food with utensils. My challenge is inflamed by herbs and gummed by fruit rich in Vitamin C. Such rigors are interrupted by event involving neither cocaine or cigarettes.
My single favorite sentence from the issue:
from ‘Night, Mystery, Secresie, and Sleep’ by Gary Amdahl
A strange little tune, breezy but suggestive of the inner lives of clowns, one associated perhaps with ice-skating, with red-cheeked young men and women holding each other’s hips and hands while their bladed feet cross snicking and rasping according to the metronome of what is possible, over the thin ice of what is not, dance hall rhythms inconsequent in themselves but burdened in some incomprehensible way and accompanied by such dark and unlooked-for harmonies as one can hear only in silence and the presence of death.
An excerpt from a piece that should sell you this issue:
from ‘Subtraction Is the Only Worthwhile Operation’ by Ander Monson
This story is a twin, a bomb, a heart within a heart. Is seen through Sunday glass and on TV. Is watched from outside houses without sound. Is found scratched in the cover of an old Webster’s with a knife or with another semisharp instrument like a compass or an edge of glass.
3RD BED [8]
Contributors:
Forest Aguirre, Laylah Ali, Louis Aragon; André Breton, & Phillipe Soupault (trans. by James Grinwis); Kaoru Arima, Bridgete Bates, Kenneth James Calhoun,Walter Cummins, Ruth Danon, Danielle Dutton, Margaret Frozena, Bob Harrison, Hiroshi Kan, Daniil Kharms (translated by Matvei Yankelevich), Michael Martone, Corey Mead, Henri d’Mescan & Davis Schneiderman, Kim Parko, Heidi Peppermint, Andrea Read, Elizabeth Robinson, Fish Ryan, Tomaz Salamun (trans. by the author and J. Beckman), Selah Saterstrom, Catherine Scherer, Kan Takahama, Christian TeBordo, Tristan Tzara (trans. by Nick Moudry), Keith Waldrop, Rosemarie Waldrop, & Mark Yakich
An excerpt from a stellar piece that caught me off-guard:
from ‘HmmBird’ by Kenneth James Calhoun
The brother sees this. A wedge drops out of his face, as if hacked out with a single swing of an ax. This is a smile. Here is what he has been waiting for: an opportunity to reject the possibility of imagination. When he plays animal games now, he plays the possum or the rattler. He loads a gun with tacks.
An excerpt from a piece that I knew was going to be amazing and then was:
from ‘Explain’ by Kim Parko
Explain the potential causes.
If your heart is both loose and beating rapidly. It is good to identify why. Practice by lying in bed. Concentrate on the looseness and the beating. Think of three vastly different concepts. Some choices: houseplant, cobweb, unmade bed. One will certainly exacerbate the situation.
My single favorite sentence from the issue:
from ‘Love Is a Thing that Wakes Up in the Middle of the Night and Burns Down the House’ by Tara Wray
The couch was not burning, just the fires, and so I tried to sit.
An excerpt from a piece that should sell you this issue:
from ‘A breath of Fresh Death’ by Christian TeBordo
A boy awakes to the smell of death, and for a moment, it is his own. It is the smell of his own death. But he is not nauseous. The smell of death is not nauseating when it is your own, when the death is radiating from your nostrils. Your own death smells like withered flowers doused in gasoline, or so I am told. The boy’s death smells like withered flowers doused in gasoline.
3RD BED [10]
Contributors:
Forrest Aguirre, William Allen, Kelli Auerbach, Melissa R. Benham, Jedidiah Berry, Kate Hill Cantrill, Kevin Caron & John Cotter, Tim Conley, Patricia Eakins, Joshua Edwards, John Fried, Diana George, Arielle Greenberg, May Hall, José Hernàndez & Luis Buñuel, Kirsten Hilgeford, Joy Katz, Lady Mannequin, W. B. Keckler, László Krasznahorkai (trans. Gabor Komaromy), Bill Kushner, Gary Lutz & Thomas V. Davis, Mitchell Marco, Michael Mejia, Bruna Mori, Jennifer Moss, Marc Phillips, Jonathan Pickering, Pedro Ponce, Daniel Rounds, G. David Schwartz, Sims, Joseph Starr, Peter Tunstall, Deb Olin Unferth, Wendy Walker, Timothy Watt, John Dermot Woods, & Tara Wray
An excerpt from a stellar piece that caught me off-guard:
from ‘The Question’ by Peter Tunstall
I wake to the red light of St Lupine’s day just dawning, just like that first kindling, and bits of my tongue are scattered over three continents, and the left cloud is just spitting, and the right cloud is biding its time. And it’s cold now, and that sort of thing.
An excerpt from a piece that I knew was going to be amazing and then was:
from ‘The Pornographers of Lilliput’ by Pedro Ponce
The pornographers of Lilliput are easily impressed. They train their cameras on the boring and banal, mistaking bulk for a form of grand obscenity. Dazzled by the vast proportions of the ordinary, they fail to distinguish between acts of pragmatism and passion. Everything is foreplay, everything is consummation. Minutes into filming, the director is already flushed, breathing heavily, barking Get that—Get that—and that—
My single favorite sentence from the issue:
from ‘Bacanal’ by Luis Bunuel and Jose Hernandez
The puddles formed a decapitated domino of buildings, of which one is the tower they told me about in childhood, with only one window as high up as a mother’s eyes as she leans over the cradle.
An excerpt from a piece that should sell you this issue:
from ‘The Sordid’ by John Dermot Woods
(I can’t excerpt this here as it is a comic, beautifully reproduced in this issue, but it is the first comic that John Dermot Woods published, and as such, definitely a piece that you should own)
3RD BED [11]
Contributors:
Anna Lewis, Rachel Beth Glaser, G. C. Waldrep, Hillery Hugg & Adriana Grant. Chapbooks, Excerpts & Novellas by Brian Evenson, Gary Lutz & Tom Davis, Corey Mead, Sam Michel, Kathryn Rantala, Nina Shope, Laura Sims, Heidi Lynn Staples, Steven Stapleton & Jane Unrue.
An excerpt from a stellar piece that caught me off-guard:
from ‘Take Car Fake Bear Torque Cake: A Memoir’ by Heidi Lynn Staples
I wasn’t conceived in take car fake bear torque cake. My mother almost died giving take car fake bear torque cake to me. My father confessed to some myriad of take car fake bear torque cakes to her on the night of my take car fake bear torque cake. Not exactly an auspicious take car fake bear torque cake.
An excerpt from a piece that I knew was going to be amazing and then was:
from ‘Fugue-State’ by Brian Evenson
Startled, he must have exclaimed aloud, for Bentham turned his head slightly in the direction of the intercom speaker. The blood in one socket slopped against the bridge of this nose. The blood in the other spilled down his cheek, gathering in the whorl of his ear.
My single favorite sentence from the issue:
from ‘In Urbem’ by Nina Shope
in the night, whole blocks collapse, building upon building falling to the basement.
An excerpt from a piece that should sell you this issue:
from ‘You Eat Pancakes Every Day’ by Rachel B. Glaser
We had thought for most of forever that the Bee-Gees were young black women, wiggling wide hips and waggling their eyelashes at each other. So now, now they are bearish looking white guys instead? They look like next-door-neighbors. Disappointed isn’t always the right word. Sometimes there isn’t a right word, there’s just the thing.
So that is that. The 3RD BED empire, one I wish was still growing but that was halted by the financial burdens of the world; one though that is, thankfully, still available (for the time being) here.
Up next, to close this mother out: Derek White’s MARSUPIAL, Gary Lutz’s STORIES IN THE WORST WAY, & SLEEPINGFISH 8.
