TBT: OFF RADAR: Cafe Review 28 straight years of the real thing
Here’s the full Kennebec Journal and Morning Sentinel article from June 1 of last year highlighting our Winter 2017 Issue: https://www.centralmaine.com/2017/06/01/off-radar-cafe-review-2/
From the article: “Well-edited, tastefully made literary magazines can still be spotted in book stores, planted on the coffee table, and picked up from time to time — for the enjoyment of reading a poem or two in one of your New York minutes. Or Portland minute, as it were, in the case of The Cafe Review, which is just straight up the real thing. A poetry magazine that is made to actually be read.
In the Winter 2017 issue, which I recently received, there are a number of poems that will let some sunlight into your digital cave for a few minutes this morning or tomorrow afternoon. I was mowed down by Annie Seikonia’s wistful recollection, “Four Songs of Portland.” Maybe you have to have the city in your own deep past, as I do, to get the full effect of the visuals in these poems (“the cheerful yellow and white / ferries departed blasting / Portland with their song”), but the music is available to anybody:
bittersweet the love that destroyed this city
dark the ashes we drank and glittery
down on the wharves
in the lamp-lit pretty
To me this whole issue of TCR would have been worth the editors’ efforts for just these lines and the stanzas that follow them. But there are also two of former Maine Poet Laureate Wesley McNair’s harrowing, probing lyrics on his childhood, “My Stepfather’s Cars” and “When They Lay Down,” a characteristically well-crafted variation on set forms in which lines are repeated in patterns from stanza to stanza. Editor Steve Luttrell offers two of his quirky, incisive poems, “Winter Apples” and “Weather Report” which ponders people’s endless propensity to talk about the weather. Flynn O’Brien, of Portland, also has a three-section poem “For Three Poets,” and among the other poems are feisty shots by old-timers Pete Brown (“Robots”), who was a songwriter for the legendary band Cream, and Keith Reid (“I Ain’t Dead Yet”), a songwriting member of the slightly less legendary Procol Harum.”
Here’s a link to our Winter 2017 Issue: http://www.thecafereview.com/past-issues/cafe-review-2017-winter-issue/