They’re really not. Either someone’s blowing smoke up your ass, or they’re kicking you in it. It’s easy to write off the praise, and hard to ignore the criticism. So it’s important to remember that reviews are written for an audience, and not the artist — or in this case, not the editor. And it’s just as important for an editor. I don’t have the kind of emotional investment in RATTLE that I would have for a book I’d written myself, but I do have the same kind of temporal investment, the same opportunity cost, and the hundred or so writers we publish in each issue feel like family…distant cousins in many cases, but there’s still blood.

Two reviews of RATTLE #28 have come out in the last month, and they demonstrate both sides of the coin. The first, at NewPages.com (scroll down to the R’s), is inarguably glowing, as it praises our selection of poems, our humor, and the nurses tribute in particular. But if you know anything about NewPages.com, you know that they don’t publish negative reviews — the reviewers focus on magazines they already know they like. So while I’m grateful for Anne Wolfe’s opinion, especially her emphasis on the nurses, who I think are spectacular, I can’t help but wonder about all those reviewers who might not be so enthusiastic. What might they have said, given the chance?

Well, I didn’t have to wait long. Luna Park is a new quarterly, and seems to do a good job of filling a mostly vacant niche — the online and modernized role of Literary Magazine Review. The website is tasteful, the reviews seem thoughtful, and most importantly, they seem to really care about the value of an honest opinion.

One might describe Gregg Weiss’s review of RATTLE #28 as “mixed”, but “kindly negative” is probably more accurate. At first read, this one hits me where it hurts — the criticism is that the we’re exactly what I aim not to be; no matter how hard I’ve tried to be eclectic, we’re a one trick pony, publishing only “weighty-topic free-verse.” I’ve always felt like we needed to diversify, and I’ve been preaching just that since I started running things — basically, Weiss is telling me that I’ve failed. We’ve “opted for Creedence Clearwater Revival instead of Picasso,” whatever that means.

But then I realize that’s not the only place I have no idea what he means. Take his penultimate paragraph for example. “Like the emotional effect of Schindler’s List, the vast majority of small-moment poems may seem momentarily counterintuitive, but are ultimately self-evident.” Huh?

And I start to notice other little problems, too. One of his examples of a “Heavy Shit” topic is “assassinations.” There is one poem called “Assassin”, but it’s about the glutinous complacency of suburban life. Later in the review, the poem Weiss lists as his favorite happens to be one of the heaviest in the issue. And as for a lack of light, “small moment” poems, what about a group of inmates playing soccer with their slippers? Or “Stud Spray”? Or Roy Jacobstein’s narrator secretly being a duck? The more I think about his call for “Billy Collins poems” the more I realize I don’t know what he means by that.

But the icing on the cake is his claim that “Only one of the 98 poems features either a rhyming or metric pattern.” I don’t know which of the several sonnets he’s referring to, so I don’t know which ones don’t count. The idea of a reviewer criticizing something they can’t even recognize is a little baffling, and I must say, undermines his whole piece. Fourteen lines of slant-rhymed pentameter, three quatrains with a couplet at the end, should be kind of obvious, shouldn’t it?

So ha, I showed him, right? But then after he hit you where it hurt, he lands the sucker punch — there’s nothing worse than getting defensive about a negative review, and here I am, getting defensive. Damn you, Weiss! Resistance is futile.

In the end, I agree with the overarching argument, despite his critical mistakes — we could still be more eclectic, and looking back at the last issue, it does tend to be heavier and more free-versed in balance than I’d prefer. But the assumption that this is a stance, by design, is untrue. We like formal verse; we like to laugh. We’re just at your mercy — send us a funny sestina! Write a navel-gazing ghazal! We can only publish what seems worth it from what we get. Stop being so damn serious, people!