Audience, Poetry, Plays, Interviews, Stories (Vol 1, No. 4)

Audience, Poetry, Plays, Interviews, Stories (Vol 1, No. 4)
Chief Editor M. Stefan Stroizier
World Audience, Inc
ISBN: 1-934209-32-5
Fiction, Anthology
Reviewed by Eugen M. Bacon

A more audacious brand of anthologies is yet to emerge in rivalry to this vastly potent compilation so full of cheek, how witty. One cannot fail to connect with Audience, Poetry, Plays, Interviews, Stories (Vol 1, No. 4).
Sometimes complex, mercurial, this World Audience assortment is unmistakably electrical. From A. G. Bennett’s Memoirs of a Star Child, speculative fiction with an authoritative twist, to double-barreled-question Interviews with illuminating ripostes that could create epithets in themselves (Bravo Leonore Dvorkin et al); from no-nonsense plays to camaraderie and verse of unbendable quality, half-everything is fluid, almost poetic, sometimes poetic. The writing herein is as detached as it is personal, as satirical as it is avid.
A gushing reference to every distinct author would be in order... but impractical. M. Stefan Stroizier’s interview of Ernest Dempsey (aka Abdul Karim Khan) is worthy of mention, as is Dempsey’s interview of Leonare Dvorkin with respect to Apart from you. Favorite plays include Buckshot by Charles Wesley Bartlett & Jack Cooper, sharp, funny, so real. Louis Phillips’ Fans is so ingenious, I read it out loud to anyone who listened. A loon surgery; a maddening fetus; a battle scene where Krauts might become Americanized on the unadulterated starting point of a naked Betty Grable; two lovers plotting; the interrogation of a murderous schizophrenic and a driving lesson from hell and each play is wholly captivating, vivid, does not fail to touch upon a pertinent element of sociology.
For a reviewer not especially of poetic aptitude, the following pieces did not fall short of notice: Howard Camner’s American Trilogy and food for the rats, one reason to live and a man with an Armageddon head. Left in a cloud of smoke; Andrew Miller’s Red Gospel; M. Stefan Strozier’s sinister Paranoia, a certain holding flow in it; Fred Ferraris’ batch and style; Michael Shorb’s 3 Photographs of General George Custer; Simon Perchik’s moon breaking out Poetry, quite literary; Jack Cooper’s The Welling Up. Are we supposed to feel this way?