Jack Spicer said if you want to be a political poet, write letters to the editor. We say a poem and a letter to the editor aren’t so far apart so long as you aren’t boring about it. Industrial Lunch is a new magazine for writing and art that’s selfish enough to call itself poetry. What kind of work are we looking for? We don’t really know. We don’t really “have” an aesthetic but we know what we li
ke and it tends not to look like what people who say “we know what we like” would usually like. We like to feel the earth move under our feet. We like to have comfort and possibility jostled around with, without feeling like we’re being exploited or manipulated. We like honesty that isn’t really worried about how honest it is or can be, that is we like things that take power relations into account, that think about how they might impact others who are not themselves or however one might phrase it. We long for ethical lives, we try and fail, and we like to read and look at work that confronts that failure, that impossibility, by saying “things could be different but they’re not but they could be.” We like to have fun and we like to be in love. We like to shout indoors. We like a lot of stuff. And we would like YOU to send us your poems and visual art for our first issue! And tell your friends, too. We don’t really know what we’re doing but we’re sure together, you and us, we’ll figure it out. Alice Hall
David W. Pritchard
Zachary L P
A.B. Robinson
