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**PRINT: Our 30th broadsheet, GIVES BIRTH TO MONSTERS, by Chicago-based Spencer Dew, is a tale of one man's small heartbreak, the backdrop to a contemporary landscape of well-meaning but ultimately shallow political activism, fractured communicative lines, and more ultimately enduring drives toward total inebriation. In classic Dew fashion, he'll have you laughing all the way to brink of the void. Dew is the author of the short-story collection Songs of Insurgency (2008). This issue also features excerpts from our David Foster Wallace collaborative mini-tribute by THE2NDHAND editor Todd Dills and Bellingham, Wash.-based Doug Milam, author of our 27th broadsheet

**WEB: FOUR CARDINAL RULES FOR CRAFTING A RESPECTABLE POEM Tyler Enfield
STUPID QUESTIONS Aaron Edmund Sitze
ARCHITECTURAL ABSENCES Sarah Joy Freese
THE LIARS Heather McShane
WING & FLY: BEST OF 2008: SACRIFICIAL CIRCUMCISION OF THE BRONX, review | Todd Dills
WAITING FOR DESSERT AT THE PALMER HOUSE HILTON Ling Ma
MIXTAPE: GET THE HELL OUT OF TOWN, JOHN MCENTIRE Jill Summers
STOIC COMMANDERS OF FAT MALE THIGHS Marc Baez
HIDEOUS BOUNTY: I AM IN HERE | Andrew Davis

FOUR CARDINAL RULES FOR CRAFTING A RESPECTABLE POEM
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Tyler Enfield

Enfield's work won the Writers Federation of New Brunswick Literary Prize, the New Times Short Fiction Contest and the Feathertale Short-Short Fiction Contest and was shortlisted for the 2007 Prism International Nonfiction Award. In addition, it's seen the light of day in several magazines and journals.

1. Never say what you mean. This is imperative. If you must, in a first draft, be frank and honest, ensure later drafts add layers of opacity.

THE LEFT HAND: Soap, Lit

2. Stupefy your reader. Bring your knowledge to bear in such a way as to make readers feel small, inexperienced, poorly read and uncouth. This can be accomplished by: a) Making frequent references to Greek literature, which you must familiarize yourself with for this express purpose. Don't allow its irrelevance to trouble you. You need only drop a name or two into a roughly suitable context. Extra points for the mention of Orpheus or Oedipus and for placing any ancient Greek personage into paradoxically modern situations or predicaments. b) As above, you may also salt your verse with Latin, or even better, French and French streets (Rue de's), so long as you do so in a manner that leaves non-Latin/French speakers embarrassed for their failure to learn extinct or superfluous languages.

3. Borrow inspiration. If you find yourself lacking in original ideas, choose another person's art, and then describe it. This technique is most effective if the original artist is European, dead, and esteemed somewhere between van Gogh and total obscurity, but never one or the other. The genius of this strategy is that you require no genius of your own; simply highlight the finer points of a painting, poem, museum, etc., bridge it to your own life with a metaphor, and in the final lines propose a transformation of self that exists as possibility but falls utterly short with the last word. The important thing is that you express yourself. No matter that you have little to say.

4. Exploit your tragedies. This is a must. If you have not done so already, begin by removing all allusions to joy, positivity, and wholesome satisfaction with life, for a proper postmodern writer must employ the whole of her misery, enlarging upon it with ink and page so that others may join hands in despair. Next, scroll through the misfortunes of your life. They are yours, and exist for the sole purpose of dramatization. If you have endured a divorce, a miscarriage, held a parent's hand on their deathbed, by God, it is your solemn responsibility to decorate these moments and publish them at the world, for how else will we share in your agony?



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OUR FRIENDS AT The Left Hand make great soap, salves, balms and other natural hygiene-type stuff, in addition to publishing a zine and running a book swap, a performance series and more from their Tuscaloosa, AL, homebase. When they offered to make something for us, we jumped. We introduce THE2NDHAND soap, an olive oil soap with a quadruple dose of Bergamot, "for the readers we've sullied..." Price is $6, ppd.

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