Just because Grain is published in Saskatchewan, Canada, doesn't mean it publishes only Canadian authors. And even if it did, I'd still encourage you to buy an issue and check it out.
Grain contains far more poetry than prose, but the few prose pieces are quite memorable. Most of the prose is written in the first person, mock-confessional tone of much contemporary prose. The poetry in Grain is all over the map both in the style of writing, as well as the geographic origin of the poets.
To give you an idea of the poetry in Grain, I'll have to present excerpts from a few of my favorites from this issue.
Eric Trethewey's "Touch" is simple and powerful:
Touching, we say, as if to hold
in a word the mysterious pressure
of feeling's invisible hand
I also enjoyed Trevor Corkum's "i thought i would die in the night" despite the cliché poetic device of not capitalizing "I":
i thought i would die in the night
of confusion
of the old-fashioned Christian kind, where God
is not God at all
but a young man who leans from the sky
eager to enter your mind
& to judge.
And I'll finish with a few lines from "Min an Lea: Of Evening," translated from the Gaelic by Kathleen Donovan:
They stretch beyond the shale and blood;
my human aspirations,
but never surpass the awe of beauty,
though the air is thin, and I grow dizzy.
You don't even have to go to Canada to find Grain. You can get copies of this literary journal through its web site at http://www.grainmagazine.ca.
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