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The Literary Review – Spring 2004

Volume 47 Number 3

Jennifer Gomoll

The Literary Review has an emphasis on international writing.

The Literary Review has an emphasis on international writing. This issue features a piece on the Danish Writers School, and contains work by six of its students. There is also a remarkable selection of poems by sisters Henia and Ilona Karmel, Jewish survivors of WWII. The poems, translated by Fanny Howe and Arie Galles from the original Polish, are bleak, uncompromising, and undeniably powerful; witness the last lines of “Procession” by Henia: “[. . .] four from a nightmare / Lugged on their heavy shoulders / A bundled body. / They couldn’t cope and let it drop. / It screamed in its own blood.” Closer to home, we have Rem Reynolds’s “Tommy,” about a depressed woman whose husband is managing the budding career of the striking but mentally ill title character. “Death of the Rabbits” by Mariana Romo-Carmona presents a man obsessed with a dream world that opens up from a crack in the exposed brick wall of his trendy Queens loft. “Shadows” by Brendan Short is a moving piece concerning a home health aide on the last day of her taking care of a woman with Alzheimer’s. Short’s descriptions of the aide’s tenderness and the woman’s confusion are sweet and heartbreaking, respectively, and like many of the pieces here, resonate long after the book is closed. [The Literary Review, 285 Madison Avenue, Madison NJ 07940. E-mail: [email protected]. Single issue: $7. http://www.theliteraryreview.org] – JQG

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