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Third Coast – Fall 2003

Issue 17

Fall 2003

Terri Denton

This issue opens with a Q & A of poet Juliana Baggott, who has several poems featured here. Her responses are quick-witted and funny, quite, I imagine, as you’d expect a poet’s to be. When asked why she doesn’t write formal poetry, she responds, “I mistake quatrain for Coltrane, terza rima for tiramisu,” and, while she agrees that “there is desperation in numbers, an attempt to keep account like naming babies in an orphanage hospital,” she admits that she will “forever 1-2-3 a waltz.” Witty indeed, and her poems – beautifully imagined and written. For example, in “The Stolen Poem: My Brother Poem after Levine’s ‘What Work Is’,” she writes, “He won’t admit to rain. Only / A break in the sun to wait out / My brother wait for it to unwind / amid the no-no of children, jazz, Scotch.”

This issue opens with a Q & A of poet Juliana Baggott, who has several poems featured here. Her responses are quick-witted and funny, quite, I imagine, as you’d expect a poet’s to be. When asked why she doesn’t write formal poetry, she responds, “I mistake quatrain for Coltrane, terza rima for tiramisu,” and, while she agrees that “there is desperation in numbers, an attempt to keep account like naming babies in an orphanage hospital,” she admits that she will “forever 1-2-3 a waltz.” Witty indeed, and her poems – beautifully imagined and written. For example, in “The Stolen Poem: My Brother Poem after Levine’s ‘What Work Is’,” she writes, “He won’t admit to rain. Only / A break in the sun to wait out / My brother wait for it to unwind / amid the no-no of children, jazz, Scotch.”

Fine examples of other writers’ crafts are here, too, including “After the Unimaginable” by Marisa de los Santos: “At breakfast, my husband reads the paper / that was not, up close, a real paper.” Further into the poem, it gets chilling as the narrator explains of her child, “I did not touch / as he was carved into the very shape of peace. / The baby, too, is borrowed.” Also of note in this issue are the short stories “No Dressing” by Orman Day and “Seams” by Moira Crone, a tale of innocence lost with a bit of mystery tossed in. [Third Coast, Department of English, Western Michigan University, Kalamazoo Michigan 49008-5092. www.wmich.edu/thirdcoast] – TD

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