Mad Hatter's Review

Issue 12 is now online, and it's pretty amazing. One of the great things about web mags is they don't have to be little; they can offer much more content than traditional hardcopy literary periodicals. And that's true in spades at Mad Hatter's. I've been browsing through it for the past two weeks and don't think I've come anywhere close to the end of it.

Mad Hatter's is the brainchild of new Ashevillian Carol Novack, a.k.a. Loopdeeloopy Lala, the author of Giraffes in Hiding: The Mythical Memoirs of Carol Novack (Spuyten Duyvil Press, 2010), who's appeared ... er, performed? a couple of times already on Wordplay*, and will no doubt return. In addition to the Review, she also curates the Mad Hat's readings, the first two of which were hosted by the Black Mountain College Museum + Arts Center.

Not limited by paper page counts and formats, online mags like Mad Hatter's can offer a wonderful range of content. This issue of the journal features poetry, digital fiction, reviews, stories, creative non- fiction, drama (in audio format, yet), music, and much more - including, even, one of the pieces on Charles Olson I've been working on for the past year. Altogether, aside from the editors, there are one hundred thirty-nine (yes, if I'm counting correctly) contributors.

Oh, did I mention that its graphics are truly remarkable? The image at the top of this post, Tree, by Gene Tanta, appears on the home page of the Columns section - and there's a virtual gallery's worth of such fascinating, hallucinatory images over at the site. Anyway, do give it a look.

* One of Carol's shows is now up on the ibiblio archive: August 1, 2010, which I also rebroadcast this past Sunday, since I had to be taping downtown at airtime.