A lot to enjoy and plan to go back to in the new issue of Sarah Mangold's Bird Dog. The always excellent Anne Boyer works with slightly atypical source material (H.C. Anderson) and John Olson continues his bid to be "our Coolidge":

Biophysics is needed to explain crinkling. Crinkling occurs in sacks and cellophane. The emotion of this is toast. Daubs of Friday smeared on a handstand. Very current and roaring palmistry.

(Genius and gibberish, not necessarily in either/or pairing since 1912.)

The editorial find that leads me to salute Mangold is the work of Gale Czerski, identified in the contrib notes only as living in Portland, Oregon. With this work Czerski joins a gang of violent mechanists that have been rattling magazines the past couple years -- Boyer and Lara Glenum are two widely circulating examples; Danielle Pafunda and Kirsty Odelius also come to mind. (I don't mean to slight the work of Sabrina Orah Mark, Kirsten Kaschock, or Heidi Lynn Staples -- I read less aggression and indifference in their quizzicalisms -- and I guess it's wack but I see Arielle Greenberg and Mangold as of an earlier, still hazily defined moment.*)

In "Ambulatory siren songs," Czerski writes, "Snowy Madeleine, are you seasoning, are you salt? How silently you call. Where are you in the natural death of this, Madeleine?" The characteristic pleasure in mixing sing-song and limit cases (e.g. death) will alert certain readers to look for the influence of Djuna Barnes. Czerski's moves in the patently formulaic "Your absence will be noticed," qualify gender roles to the point of erasing familiar expectations:

in the children's story your mother is a firefly and your father is a grasshopper no try again in the children's story your mother is the Serpent Mounds and your father is the Catawba Islands no try again in the children's story your mother is Harriet the Spy and your father is the Snowy Day no try again in the children's story your mother is Madison Public Pool and your father is Lakewood Public Library no try again in the children's story your mother is Lake Erie and your father is the Cuyahoga River no try again in the children's story your mother is a sheet of waxed paper and your father is a ginger snap...

Anybody can throw around binaries to entertaining effect; combined with the mother/father pairing and the midwest geography, the absence of any other leading emotional cues is totally hot -- impossible (as a 19-45 yr old American, anyway) to read this piece without relief at Czerski's stalwart refusal to manipulate the reader. Right on.

*Whoa, early morning compartmentalizing thoughts, take it easy on me. There are lots of writers who ostensibly share some of these qualities whom I wouldn't group here at all: Nada Gordon, Alex Lemon, Sarah Manguso, or Jeff Clark, say.