Fixed and Free Quarterly: Volume 2, Issue 4, December 2023
Edited by Billy Brown and originating in Albuquerque, Fixed and Free Quarterly is the print anthology that heralds the many poets who’ve participated in the monthly on-line featured readings and open mics that Billy hosts. Poets from all over the country are invited to participate.
The quarterly is another compelling example of the literary riches to be found in New Mexico and takes its place alongside many other noted publications, like the late Gary Brower’s wonderful Malpais Review, Sin Fronteras/Writers Without Borders, Santa Fe Literary Review and the recent New Mexico Poetry Anthology 2023, edited by Michelle Otero and Levi Romero which features over 200 poets.
This latest issue is an elegiac one that pays tribute to two devoted long time Fixed and Free contributors. The late Paul Woodruff, a University of Texas professor is given a poignant eulogy and several of his poems are featured, including these lines from the poem, “The Earth is None the Wiser”: We do not make the earth/ any wiser by the damage/We do to it, or by the horrors/On its surface we inflict against/Others. The accompanying poetic remembrances and memorials are lovely farewells. Also, the recent passing of musician and poet E. Terry “Mess” Messal is given generous space and his life and work is celebrated.
In the poem, “Writer-Like You: Message to Mentor”, Messal bemoans the mostly sedentary nature of word-slinging: I wasn’t set up for all this here sittin’ writing makes me do . . . Nah, I was made to explore, soar, oar, climb, mount, descend, swim, trim, whim like your favorite birds ‘n bugs ‘n real beings do. That said, some eighteen lines later he has, in spite of himself, finished a poem. Reviews are also reliable staples of the quarterly as are short literary or personal essays by Vijali Hamilton and Robert J. Weber. The reviews by noted New Mexico authors Lenora Rain-Lee Good, Bill Nevins, Merimée Moffitt, and Janet Ruth, offer contrast, perspective and attention to newly published work that resides mostly within the realm of the Small Press.
The original poems and prose included cover the stylistic literary waterfront (or desertscape) with local authors such as Rich Boucher, Billy Brown, Jim Dudley, Kathamann, Georgia Santa Maria and celebrate, for instance, the haiku, like this one taken from the award-winning longer poem “A Fine Kettle of Poem-Fish” by Janet Ruth: desert poem-pupfish/in shrinking desert puddle/a haiku life. It’s journey culminates brilliantly in a stark recognition of what most poetry is after: and even if you are blind, even if you live/in the darkest space within the earth,/you can find a luminous cave-poem-fish/that feels its way toward the truth.
This latest installment of the Fixed and Free Quarterly is full of reckoning, resilience, wildness, a fierce divination of the light and “the wisdom of darkness.”