Boxcar

Boxcar

Today I stumbled onto some solid poems in an online journal I, well, also stumbled onto. Boxcar Poetry Review knows what it is doing, based on my, um, hour of reading that I feel only barely, but does, give my statement weight (after all, to hold anyone on the web for an hour is pretty impressive...I could have easily gone here).

So often journals seem good intentioned but haphazard, especially when putting everything on the internet with its irksome formatting. The most frustrating thing to me is to start investigating an online journal and then, suddenly, it crashes, or a link explodes, or a poem turns into mush. (A side-note essay on the difficulty with e-books for poetry can be found here.)

Boxcar assembles a print anthology every year or two, which is a good thing considering how often poems published there get "Best of The Net" nods: six in 2010. It is published quarterly, and the fall issue is up and ready for your reading pleasure. After clicking on a poem, you see that they are numbered at the top from 1-12. My favorite poems are numbers 11, 12, and 5, in that order, with 11 and 12 close to a tie. Each poem has a different style, showing that Boxcar has a wide palette that doesn't favor just one or two types of "good" poetry.

Looking through an interesting inter-journal contest they have, I think I might write about this poem in the next post, because it is the coolest thing I've read today. Enjoy your Boxcar ride...toot toot (had to).