My copy of SEIN UND WERDEN'S winter print edition came sliding out of its envelope to reveal a fetching cat woman, gently licking her lovely manicured paw. It is bound with a pink silk ribbon and printed on thick, deliciously tactile rag paper, it is enticing, gently seductive, a pretty pet. Inside - a selection of short fiction, poetry and images all devoted to the 'philias and fetishes' theme. If you purchase a copy of this magazine, and I urge you to do so, yours will have its own unique cover. But if that isn't enough to tempt you, read on...
Things begin with a bang courtesy of Jennifer Chesler's The Strap-on Nurse. This is deliciously horrible, dirty writing. It captures perfectly with very few words the peculiar nausée that lurks on the dark side of sexual experience. This first piece serves as a kind of trope, for the issue is riddled with secret structures (and strictures) - things fold and unfold, double back upon themselves, we meet them coming and we meet them going, the teeth, the feet, the paws, the men in white coats, the Herr Doktors, the tangled instruments musical and otherwise. My own Judy Rosenberg Papers (pace Johannes Rosenberg ) makes use of the diary format and the hospital/asylum setting. The hospital reappears in The Tangential Thoughts of Dr. Filth by Pablo Vision , a delirious, surreal, subliminal text that comes with its own 'dissection' at the back of the book, like those 'answer keys' you may remember from school workbooks. Meanwhile the 'filth' is picked up and carried (smeared?) in the mysterious, slightly blurred images by N. Ayad of limbs half-buried in mud and leaves, and by Juliet Cook in her succint poem Purple Speculum, which is also rife with mysterious animal imagery:
Beak, beak, beak until I am tizzy with new imprints.
My ruffled underside. My plucked spine. My peeled skin
a browning apple dumpling under your spoon.
Cook has a way with foody stuff - her Older Woman Fantasy begins with the image of 'a fresh custard-filled donut' and urges ASK ME ABOUT/OUR ICE CREAM SOCIAL LOBOTOMY! The Q & A format is put to good use by Roberta Lawson in The Temple and the Fortress, a free-floating, surreal meditation on love and loss, women and monkeys... I found this piece oddly moving. Or should that be moving oddly?
I'd like to give special mention to Nick Jackson's Anton's Discovery. This is a beautifully written story, with a strange and powerful mood all its own. A young boy's encounter with a dead bird leads him into a labyrinth of discovery, to sex, power, hatred, maybe even love. The dreadful sister is unforgettable. Also fine is The Theory of Amazement by Richard J. Polney, a well-structured piece in which a self-disgusted, self-styled 'Ganymede' to an impossibly aged King Lear wanders across a war-torn landscape and muses on death, destruction and ennui.
SEIN UND WERDEN is going from strength to strength, and editor Rachel Kendall is tending a very special garden among those many new plots that are flourishing outside the mainstream. Her garden is a strange one, lit with a hellish light, and playful for all that, in the way that dangerous animals can be playful. But find out for yourself.
The Print Issue of the Philias and Fetishes edition of SEIN UND WERDEN can be purchased HERE
Biographies for all contributors to the print issue are HERE
My review of the Philias and Fetishes on-line edition is HERE
Pictures: Catwoman from Sci-Fi Desktop.org , Photo of donut by Uberculture cc on flickr.com
Posts
