From American Book Review, v 28 #5, July 2007

Why another poetry anthology? The question hangs over the inaugural issue of Zoland Poetry, a new annual from New Hampshire independent house Steerforth Press, like a tacit rebuke. Bookstore poetry sections are clotted with anthologies of every stripe, and the market for poetry being presumably a zero-sum game, the advent of another entry into the tightly-packed shelves bears the weight of self-justification. Any modestly attentive and industrious reader of poetry, a rare enough creature to begin with, must sometimes feel the urge to throw her hands in the air and flee to the relative safety of the thrillers.

Happily, Zoland Poetry stands a much better than average chance of luring her back. What the inaugural issue lacks in focus and consistency it more than makes up for with a determined catholicity of taste and a quirky, cheerfully inclusive sensibility. Editor Roland Pease has assembled a roster of poets whose provenances range from Iceland to Persia and whose prosodies run from austere haiku-like meditations to feral free-verse explosions. If Pease’s selections indicate a lack of a strongly coherent vision, it is in the service of experimentation and openness, qualities lacking in many contemporary anthologies.

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This scabrous detective yarn is the straight-fiction debut of Warren Ellis, better known as the creator of the Transmetroplitan graphic novels. The whacked-out sensibility that characterized Transmetroplitan survives the transition to prose, but without the supercharged imagery, the narrative comes across as slapdash and juvenile. Crooked Little Vein relates the cross-country adventures of down-and-out private eye Mike McGill and his feisty sidekick Trix, with the plot functioning almost exclusively as a device for introducing a staggering procession of perverts and fetishists. Ellis may be after dark, shocking affects, but the action is so peppy that any sting is neutered. Crooked has some fun with the conventions of the gumshoe novel, and floats a half-baked sub-theory about the cultural mainstreaming of the deviant, but on the whole remains single-mindedly shallow. After a while, you get tired of waiting for the next gross-out, although the relationship between Mike and Trix eventually betrays a hint of sweetness and mutual need. It’s an amusing ride, but hardly a major accomplishment.

from The L Magazine