Salutations, Toad-Friends! When we dubbed our last issue “The Year of the Toad” we had no idea that Library Journal would officially recognize us as one of the ten best literary journals of the year. Since this international award, we’ve been rolling in subscriptions from savvy librarians across the land. Usually genius goes unnoticed, but not in this case. We are proud of this honor and intend to surpass what we did in #2 with our brand spanking new third issue, hereby entitled Toad Suck Review 3D!

Regarding our revolutionary front and back covers trailblazing a new trajectory through the History of Publishing with ye olde red and blue technology, they are what they are. I messed around with Photoshop and a tutorial on YouTube, and this is the result. Thank you, thank you, I am also amazed and amused.

More importantly, though, is what these images happen to frame, particularly our flagship piece, “Underground in Amerigo.” This is a monumental lost work by Edward Abbey, which even the most seasoned scholars of the Master Monkeywrencher (aka, Cactus Ed, the Father of the Modern Environmental Movement, etc.) don’t know jack about. I originally found this essay twenty years ago, buried in a pile of old moldy mimeo mags at the mythic bookstore Shakespeare & Company in Paris, France. It was in a forgotten quarterly called Accent, published in 1957, which I immediately sent to my friend the Abbey expert Ken Wright in Durango, Colorado, who was an editor for a weekly newspaper called Inside Outside. Ken got permission from Ed’s widow Clarke Abbey and republished this piece in 1999. Then it became lost again. Until now—thanks to Clarke, who granted the Toad (so therefore the world) the opportunity to see this great narrative in print once more!

Our groundbreaking 3D issue is therefore an extremely eco-issue, since we’ve also got Gary Snyder on board, as part of our feature on the literally lost Beat poet Lew Welch, who took a walk in the woods one day and never came back. We’re glad to have some literary criticism of his which also went astray for years, and we’re grateful to City Lights in San Francisco for granting us permission to republish this work in our Critical Intel section. But we’re also proud of the rest of our Eco Edge section—like Emily Eddins’ provocative portrait of Reno, NV and Truckee, CA, and Brent House’s postmodern pastorals, whose line breaks were so elongated that we had to flip the poems to make them fit.

Another theme in this issue is our pumped-up Arkana section. We have a phantasmagoric flash from Tyrone Jaeger’s dream-universe, and some sparkling gems of vital verse straight from the brainwaves of Sandy Longhorn. Chris Shipman and Jay Levon are visual cartographers of our geographic imagination, and Dennis Humphrey provides some fiction with characters as colorful and tragic as the state of this fracking state.

Heather Cox, however, is an exception. A native of Hot Springs, she sports a review in Critical Intel, but we’ve also injected her in with our High-Octane Poets, due to the appropriateness of her whacko mole-people poems―which complement Ben McClendon’s vast and curious galaxy of sundry funtastic poetic forms. But behold as well the Legendary Laureate Antler, who always blips brilliantly on our radar. As do Drea Kato and Molly Kat, whose really real situations become hyper-imagistic modes of momentum when rendered strophicly. Mark DeCarteret and Tracy Thomas have also got it going on in the isotope of inertia as they propel Poetix to new limits. As for Brad Johnson, how can you beat the killer effect of those last two lines of his first poem? Beautiful!

But now let’s head for Creative Nonfixion, where a sophisticated memoir of Xu Xi provides currency for currency, and Jesse Glass makes us laugh with profiles of pretentiousness. Then there’s our own Rex Rose, who’s been with us from the get go. At first he was our Design Editor, and then he was our Webmaster, but due to a recent evolution, he is now a contributor―so check out the excerpt from his punk-ass past.

Concerning the recent evolution just referred to: The Arkansas Writers MFA Program has just been launched at UCA, thereby supplying us with a bevy of new editors. Assistant Editor Scotty Lewis is one of these and is webmastering our online presence at toadsuckreview.org, where you can see a whole bunch of new online content, selected and edited by the pioneers of the most nouveau and promising grad program in creative writing on the planet. John Mitchell is another Assistant Ed, and we’ve got him cranking on a multitude of top secret tasks. The rest of the editorial staff includes Jobe (yes, one word), Stacey Margaret Jones, Louie Land and Lynne Landis. Plus, we’ve got Chris Hancock of 4.AD.PPL promoting the Toad quite cyberly. Anyhow, we’re always looking for MFA applicants, and support is available. The ad in the back can tell you more, or visit uca.edu/writing/mfa.

Meanwhile in Crititcal Intel, we have some very user-friendly art criticism from the iconic poet Gerald Locklin, who we met at the AWP and solicited with vigor. Then there’s Mark Jackson’s scholarly article on John Lomax and some highly celebrated blues legends, complete with some really cool photos, compliments of the Library of Congress. Add to this the elusive reviewer C. Prozac, the much more tangible Skip Fox reviewing a surreal text from the netherworld of Illinois, and the already mentioned Lew Welch feature, and this section is complete.

In Fixion we have the strangely deranged prose of Larry Lefkowitz, who our Associate Ed John Vanderslice described as “word drunk” when he found it raving in our inbox. It intoxicated us as well, as did the semi-disturbing-but-action-packed story by Devin Murphy and the bizarro-yet-subtle quasi-omniscience of Peter Liu.

Holy Guacamole! We’ve also got Masterbard Ed Sanders in our Artists-in-Residence Feature! Talk about a Beat Superstar! Talk about us being lucky! Talk about an interview―conducted by the editorial staff of the Toad Suck Review!

We also have a new translation from Jean Genet, never traduced nowhere before & expertly at that by Andrew Hill! I’m telling you, people, this Toad Suck is packed with Historic Stuff! Witness also the texting translations of Just Kibbe, the Georgian poet Zviad Ratiani as interpreted by Dailila Gogia and Timothy Kercher, and Margarita Meklina from St. Petersburg decoded deluxly by Krystyna Steiger. This is one hell of an international issue! We’ve got artists here from all across Asia and Arabia, from Canada and France, from Russia and America, from Israel and the grave.

Ultimately, though, check out Fred Petrucelli, whose history of Toad Suck provides perspective on the infamous name of place we embrace. We at TSR are honored that Yahoo News voted Toad Suck the “most unfortunate town name” in America, with Climax, Georgia and Boring, Oregon nipping at our heels.

That said, we’re still offering ad space ($50 for a half page, $100 for a full page) and we’ll design those ads if you like―like the one in here for Ahadada Books. But one more thing before we go, Beloved Toadsters: Please know that we appreciate your thirst for cutting-edge lit that doesn’t suck. Without your great taste, there’d be no demand for our supply. So here’s to you, whose spirit is ablaze in the hugest, most-eco, most-3D Toad Suck Review to ever challenge the status quo!