While browsing a big box bookstores (Barnes & Noble; I know, a little hypocritical of me, especially when I advocate so strongly in favor of local bookstores, but I was with a friend who was shopping at Forever 21 and I needed to get away and B&N was just down the block) I bought a copy of the little lit mag, Zone 3, to read while drinking tea and waiting for my companion’s shopping excursion to be over. I had never seen it before, but it just took a quick browse of the various options to see  that Zone 3 was something interesting.

I’m a poetry reader, rather than a short story reader, and I’m drawn to lit mags to focus heavily on verse. Unfortunately, bookstore chains, even those that stock some lit mags, tend to focus on the more mainstream mags that have mainly have fiction (Granta, Ploughshares, Sewanee Review – that sort of thing). My preference has always been for the smaller publications with a lot of poetry. Half the time, in a Barnes & Noble, that means getting Poetry, which is alright, but you’re not really branching out with that.

Zone 3 is the literary product of Austin Peay State University in Clarksville, Tennessee.

In the issue I read, I would like to single out Shannon Winston’s piece, Figure and Ground, about violence in the Holy Land. I have no idea what here experience there is, but it reads well – a nice combination of romanticism and the quotidian.

Coleman Barks poem, Witness, also deserve some mention for offering a view of youthful drug use that lives in the middle ground most of actually experienced – avoiding both the cliches of addiction or of effective insanity, while also not falling for spiritual hocus pocus. I was actually reminded of a line from Baldwin’s short story, Sonny’s Blues. A character was apologizing for having been the titular Sonny’s entree into drugs. He explained that Sonny had asked him how being high felt and responding with an honest, but hapless, “It feels good.” Of course, that story went down the road into addiction, but the idea of an honest answer – “Yes, illegal drugs have definite legal and physiological dangers associated with them, but they can feel good” – seems refreshing. I have no desire to revisit the mistakes of my youth, but neither will I pretend that I had some sort of cosmic epiphany about their essential nature or my own as a result of them. I simply grew up a little more.

But back to Zone 3. They also had some nice interviews with unusual questions that made the whole thing seem like a absurdist exercise. I can’t really explain it – just check it out.