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Sou’wester – Fall 2006

Volume 35 Number 1

Fall 2006

Quarterly

Deborah Diemont

Two short stories in this issue of Sou’wester just knock me out: April Line’s “What It Would Be Like To Have a Baby With a Turnip” and Patricia Brieschke’s “Eat!” Both feature ordinary women as protagonists and both cover themes done before: the experience of pregnancy (Turnip) and self-starvation (Eat).

Two short stories in this issue of Sou’wester just knock me out: April Line’s “What It Would Be Like To Have a Baby With a Turnip” and Patricia Brieschke’s “Eat!” Both feature ordinary women as protagonists and both cover themes done before: the experience of pregnancy (Turnip) and self-starvation (Eat). However, as is commonly noted, when it comes to good writing, it’s not what you say but how you say it. Both Line and Brieschke prove themselves to be masters of craft, laugh-out-loud humor, and the discovery of those quirky details that make us recognize our own lives. Linda Button’s “Tethered,” a story about a young woman spending an afternoon with her brother who has returned from fighting in Afghanistan, is memorable for the sense of weight and humility conveyed in a mere two pages. Jean Murray Walker’s poems, “Art” and “Recycling” show a sparse elegance similar to that found in “oriental” poetry. From “Art”: “On this scroll I see new tracks / crossing winter fields, cold rain, / river cutting through plains / night falling. Let me not ask for / untrampled snow. May I love / the moon, no longer full . . .” Another of the stronger poems found in this issue is Denise Hinrichsen’s “Resurrection Yoga,” a prose poem that is a meditative elegy for the poet’s father. Overall, the Fall 2006 Sou’wester offers some impressively good reading.
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