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Freefall – Winter/ Spring 2007-8

Volume XVII Number 2

Winter/ Spring 2007-8

Rachel King

Freefall: Canada’s Magazine of Exquisite Writing features selections from both Canadian and American authors, although the vast majority is Canadian. This journal is the first Canadian journal I’ve read, and I found the poems and stories clear, concise, and engaging.

Freefall: Canada’s Magazine of Exquisite Writing features selections from both Canadian and American authors, although the vast majority is Canadian. This journal is the first Canadian journal I’ve read, and I found the poems and stories clear, concise, and engaging.

In Micheline Maylor’s opening “Letter from the Editor,” she encourages the reader to “find a new perspective” in these pieces. While trying to sympathize with some of these characters, I did find a new perspective. In Robert Fantina’s “Forsaking All Others,” a kind wife performs a calculated murder on her next door neighbor and husband’s mistress. The narrator in Lori Ann Bloomfield’s “Starring Wanda Plimpton” still obsesses over a childhood friendship twenty years after the fact. And a man in Salvatore Difalco’s “Sunflowers” plants hundreds of sunflowers around his house to cope after his wife leaves him. I probably wouldn’t sympathize with any of these characters if I briefly encountered them in life, but the authors’ portrayals make their motivations clear and their actions explainable. All these stories are short and written in tight, fluid prose.

A couple poems also stood out in this issue. Tom Sheehan contemplates the places apples go after harvest: “They have all gone now…/…gone to day school / on yellow buses with brown baggers, or bruised / to a freckled taupe and ploughed under for ransom / and ritual.” I also enjoy when poets reflect on other arts, like when Louisa Howerow compares Gustav Klimt’s The Kiss to Constantin Brancusi’s The Kiss, concluding that the latter has, unlike the former, “Nothing remotely coy. No artifice. / In spite of stone’s inherent fault lines, / face meets face, and body presses body / in open, comforting embrace.”

The issue concludes with two interviews and two book reviews. Trevor Cole’s discussion of AuthorsAloud.com is worth reading. His site, which includes poets reading their own work, seems like the Canadian counterpart to websites like Poets.org.

Although many great U.S. emerging writers exist these days, “Americans” are sometimes too preoccupied with themselves. Freefall gives a needed dose of the good writing and emerging writers from our neighboring country to the North.
[www.freefallmagazine.ca]

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