InDigest

I was recently invited to join a Facebook group for a new localish online literary and cultural magazine called InDigest.

I'm finding it so far absolutely delightful. Some really good poems, an article on how to say 'DAMN' in binary code, and an interview with Alain Badiou? Almost inconceivable! I have no idea who the people are behind this, not that there's any reason why I would, but I really like it. Twin Cities gotta represent.

I'm most impressed with the poems of Jess Grover, whose bio is refreshingly short and succinct and tells me he went to school at Macalester and now lives in Chicago. I really like the last poem of his triptych, "high-tops," which captures a certain moment of blustery bus-catching in a cold city like Minneapolis quite accurately:

of oil slick. someone’s erupted cardboard
shanty comes
brawling across the street.
you think: that is what my mind is like.
you think: the willowy ligature
of 22 years to arrive upon
ice on a block of brick in minneapolis
distant, pinched among the corrugated floors
of you come

Water and liquids surface often in his poems...a motif I've often noticed structures much of the undercurrents and unconsciousness of Midwesterners. There's the sense of being land-locked here, millions of miles from oceans, and so strong connections to any little piddly body of water is enjoyed: the Mississippi, the tiny pond on which you have a cabin, Lake Superior. Winters are extremely dry and leave you thirsty yet there are mountains of snow to leap to catch the bus. In the summer it's not the heat, it's the humidity.

So I was interested to see such a concern with water in Grover's poems. In "Poem for Minnesota with My Friends Gone," the Mississippi is 'brittle,' moths are 'wharving thin through winter corn stalks' and the narrator dreams of wading shirtless, of a moon disappearing into seawater.

Very cool. We need more queer grammatics on Minneapolis, more Midwestern poetry that confidently charts a tack between local, homegrown indie bands and the reified, obscure poetry of the academy. Read this on your lunch break.