River Styx – 2005

An impressive 30th anniversary issue featuring many prolific and well established writers, including Dorianne Laux, Lucia Perillo, Sharon Olds, William Gass, Molly Peacock, Louis Simpson, Richard Burgin, and Robert Finch, among others, as well as many accomplished, but lesser known talents, including Alison Pelegrin, Marcela Sulak, Allen C. Fischer, and Jacbo M. Appel. An impressive 30th anniversary issue featuring many prolific and well established writers, including Dorianne Laux, Lucia Perillo, Sharon Olds, William Gass, Molly Peacock, Louis Simpson, Richard Burgin, and Robert Finch, among others, as well as many accomplished, but lesser known talents, including Alison Pelegrin, Marcela Sulak, Allen C. Fischer, and Jacbo M. Appel. The broad range of styles and subject matter is especially appealing. I appreciated Cleopatra Mathis’s lovely, quiet tribute to “Stanley and Elise” (certainly when Provincetown appears in the poem, we know the missing name is Kunitz) as much as Joel Friederich’s haunting poem “A Fairy Tale,” and Len Robert’s harsh and beautiful family poem, “Indulgences for the Dead,” as much as Ira Sukrunguang’s strange, sardonic poem, “Karma,” about an argument with a mynah bird who calls out “Hey fatty.” Most unusual and memorable is Lucia Perillo’s essay, “Bonnie Without Clyde,” an analysis of the bad girl, “gun molls” of poetry, the “outlaw personas” of verse (to which Perillo clearly aspires). The footnotes are as clever as the essay, in particular one about the author’s short-lived career as a shoplifter of meat. Hard to believe Robert Finch’s small, lyrical essay about lion’s mane jellyfish is tucked away in this same volume. These sorts of juxtapositions make this a truly splendid issue.
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