Spartan in design and mysterious in origin as only a web-based poetry magazine can be, mid)rib has published five issues of interesting, enigmatic, and occasionally indecipherable poetry with nothing more than two names and a Gmail address on the masthead. The apparently DIY character of the site is balanced, however, by the consistent high quality of the material presented, and by a careful, clean design. One gets the feeling that mid)rib is created not by mad geniuses, but by academics in exile—gone, indeed, a bit mad. If Dr. Moreau had created magazines rather than monsters, this one could well have had a place on the island. Indeed, “The Island of Dr. Toupee” from issue two defines a reoccurring theme for the magazine—that of an experiment, (which may be poetry or modernity, or something else altogether) gone horribly awry.

mid)rib’s editorial aesthetic embraces the austere, the dense, the translated and the untranslatable. The magazine’s name is swiped from botany (the midrib is the central vein of a leaf) and many of the poems reflect a certain scientific bent—as if they are pages from a complete poetic classification of the world. Cross-disciplinary and generative work seems to have become increasingly a focus for the magazine. While mid)rib remains first and foremost a poetry magazine, recent issues have included fiction, artwork, translations, videos, and some decidedly indefinable amalgamations of some or all of the above.

Like any good online poetry zine, mid)rib’s production schedule is a thing quite unknowable, but new issues are well worth watching out for. The current five should provide more than enough material to last us through the wait.

by Emily Kiernan
a native of the decaying Pennsylvania steel town from the Billy Joel song, who writes about islands, vaudeville, implacable but unjustified feelings of abandonment, the West, and places that aren’t the way she remembered them

image from mid)rib