14 - Mars

Summer 2009

PRINT EDITION: Sold out

Mars is Fuselit's 14th issue. The cover star, Tara Zed, has seen fit to use her heatray pistol to shoot through the parchment paper veneer to Mars' scarlet-membraned innards. Had she scorched further she would have mutilated poetry and fiction by:

Maya Berger • Amy Blakemore • Ahimsa Timoteo Bodhran • Philip Burton • Ryan Eames • Ben Fergusson • David Floyd • Cliff Hammett • Chris Hardy • Aiko Harman • Christopher Horton • Tim Hurley • Sam Peczek • Francine Rubin • J Sudborough • Tim Wells • Aliya Whiteley • Chrissy Williams

Not to mention three specially devised poem-puzzles and an open-out five-page comic written by Rab Green and illustrated by Fuselit's in-house team.

Safely out of Zed's reach, however, is this issue's experimental pamphlet, Telemorphics. We selected seven poets for this project, ranging from the established to the up-and-coming to Fuselit faves - Emily Berry, Ian McLachlan, Kevin Reinhardt, Christos Sakellaridis, Bethany Settle, Kathryn Simmonds and Hugo Williams. Each contributed a poem to be mangled by crude computerised translation and retranslated into a new version. Both original and end result are collected here.

Finally, the CD features three very different tracks: MSS-LHM-LHM runs Wellsian dialogue repeatedly through speech recognition software, Jude Cowan offers up a charming slice of chanson reminiscent of the late, great Jake Thackray and Richard Tyrone Jones performs a muzak-backed villanelle collaged from Total Recall and War of the Worlds.

We vouch that you can find nothing quite like the above celestial array anywhere in the immediate cosmos. A copy of From Timid to Timbuktu to the man or space vixen that proves us wrong!