Brick: A Literary Journal Number 76, Winter 2005 www.brickmag.com ISSN 0382-8565 paper, 160 pages $12 (CDN)

Four reasons to buy the Winter issue of Brick:

1) Jim Harrison’s musings on Food, Fitness and Death in which, having survived a doctor-ordered diet including “that torpid Irish exudate,” oatmeal, he sets off to the French-Catalan port of Collioure in search of the lost poems of Antonio Machado, and a meal including “tiny squid with the poetic ink staining the rice, the langoustines, the fresh favas with blood sausage, the rabbits browned with pork fat in a tomato sauce, and the food just over the bruised lip of the future, the four kilo loup de mer buried in gros sel, the eel stew…”

2) 2005 Griffin Poetry Prize winner August Kleinzahler’s description of his ideal reader, “a taxi driver in Karachi”

3) a final chance to become a 10-year Sponsor Subscriber to Brick for the unbeatable price of $195 (CDN)

4) a selection of poems by Elisabeth Mann Borgese’s English setter Arli, who, between 1963 and 1965, was taught to type using a modified Olivetti Lexikon 80 electric typewriter.

Arli was not a QWERTY typist; he had his own unique keyboard, apparently a simplified version of the Italian keyboard layout:

        Q Z E R T U I
        A S D F G O P
        C V B N H L M
            [SPACE]

We’ll close with Arli’s 1965 poem bed a ccat, which, in a truly just universe, might well have earned the setter a position on the Griffin shortlist:

bed a ccat

cad a baf
bdd af dff
art ad
abd ad arrli
bed a ccat