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The Midwest Quarterly – Summer 2004

Volume 45 Number 4

Summer 2004

Jeannine Hall Gailey

This perfectly-bound academic quarterly out of Pittsburgh State University (that’s Pittsburgh, Kansas, not Pennsylvania) presents poetry, articles, and reviews.

This perfectly-bound academic quarterly out of Pittsburgh State University (that’s Pittsburgh, Kansas, not Pennsylvania) presents poetry, articles, and reviews. For those who would like to know more about Ted Kooser, our new Poet Laureate, there is a scholarly article “When a Walk is a Poem: Winter Morning Walks, a Chronicle of Survival, by Ted Kooser” by Mary K. Stillwell that describes Kooser’s struggle with cancer and with writing his manuscript while recuperating. Sharon R. Yang compares Virginia Woolf with William Wordsworth in “Subversion of The Prelude in Jabob’s Room, or the Woolf Who Cried Wordsworth.” And Gary Scharnhorst describes government censorship in a small town in “Moodie, My Dad, Allen Ginsberg, and Me: Reflections on Wichita And ‘Wichita Vortex Sutra.’” The poems in this issue were mostly meditations on the relationships between man and nature and the larger universe. I especially liked Amy Fleury’s poem “The Fugitive Eve.” I respected the fact that most of the “scholarly articles” were layperson-readable, as opposed to being densely academic and full of footnotes, and how the articles were punctuated by poetry. Overall, this is an attractive and interesting collection of work.

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