Better than the Movies 2008
As a senior project three students (Chrystal Hartberg, Jessica Tyson and Zebulon Huset) at California State University- Long Beach produced the following collection of poems and essays. Though originally meant to be an alternative to the Best American Series, it changed slightly as the process of reading over a hundred literary magazines polished the shrine of subjectivity that is reading poetry. Instead the collection took on the theme of excellent entertainment. The following digital layouts are just proofs for the final print design, so many of the page numbers are 17.
Title Page / Editor’s notes 1 2 3 4 5 / I Followed a Ribbon / Gate C22 1 2 / The Dance Examination / God Plays Tetris 1 2 / Capp Street Incident / Rojo 1 2 / Maturity 1 2 3 / The Heart 1 2 / Naked Women of North America 1 2 / Accident 1 2 / Lilacs / Then, Everything Slept 1 2 / Coming Home 1 2 / Grief 1 2 / Impossible Equations 1 2 3 / Midsummer 1 2 3 / Sculptures 1 2 / Let it Come Down 1 2 / Testing 1 2 / Making the list I will never make 1 2 3 / The most bananas 1 2 / Balloon Animals / Uncle Walt’s Shoulders 1 2 / Aubade at the Train Station / War with Toy Soldiers 1 2 / Temptation 1 2 / The Cryptozoologist Chaperones His Daughter’s Prom 1 2 3 / The snowglobe / Display Sales 1 2 / My Affair with Rumpelstiltskin 1 2 / Not Quite Like a Raisin 1 2 / Upstairs the Eulogy, Downstairs the Rummage Sale 1 2 / The Experiment 1 2 / Martha 1 2 / Late Summer Dew 1 2 / Grasshopper 1 2 / Two-Headed Boy of Bengal, Born 1783 1 2 3 / Before You Die 1 2 / Dawn Above Spokane, Sacred Heart Hospital, 2001 1 2 / Talking to Ourselves 1 2 / Heaven 1 2 / With Love From Galveston, Texas 1 2 / The Night Driver 1 2 3 / The Invisible Man remained 1 2 / A Poem Goes Missing from his Collected Work 1 2 / I Had the Green Dream Again 1 2 / Pinata 1 2 / I Followed a Ribbon / Eight East and After 1 2 / Centipede
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These poems were originally published in the following fine literary journals and magazines. If anyone is angry about the poems being paparazzied please let us know and we’ll immediately remove said poem. We just wanted to show what we had chosen to do as a final project, and to share the slice of contemporary poetry we had chosen as “Better than the Movies.”
Allegheny Review / American Poetry Review / Black Warrior Review / Briar Cliff Review / Epicenter / Evansville Review / Fugue / Epoch / Indiana Review / Iowa Review / Lullwater Review / Massachusetts Review / Mid-American Review / New Yorker / Oprah Magazine / pacificREVIEW / Paris Review / Permafrost / Poetry Magazine / POOL / Prairie Schooner / Red Wheelbarrow / Sewanee Review / The Southern Review / Water~Stone Review / Willard and Maple / Willow Review / Yale Review