Phoebe – Spring 2004

This issue of Phoebe delivers a fresh, diverse selection of fiction and poems.

This issue of Phoebe delivers a fresh, diverse selection of fiction and poems. Its fine stories include CD Collins’s “Hands,” about a family of Kentucky tobacco farmers trying to scratch out a living, and Ananya Bhattacharyya’s “Calcutta Communists,” a charming and sharp piece in which two youngsters are exposed to the political self-righteousness of their beloved college-aged cousin. “What It Was” by Christine Sneed presents a divorcee who becomes uncomfortably involved in her neighbors’ unraveling marriage. Much of the poetry here is of an experimental or stream-of-consciousness bent; the genre has its fans, but alas I am not one of them. I was moved, however, by Nancy K. Pearson’s “Hiking the A.T.: Day 23” which finds the speaker on a difficult hiking trip, mourning the loss of a young man to a drunken prank gone wrong, and marching on. There’s an interview with Scottish poet Tom Pow, and several poems from his book Landscapes and Legacies. “#28” is a powerful one, about visiting fields where war had once taken place: “I live on blood’s doorstep and study / all the ghastliness from which I’ve been saved. // For this, all the lives I’ve yet to grieve for / haunt me, as I pass, bearing peace or war.” [Phoebe, MSN 2D6, George Mason University, 4400 University Drive, Fairfax VA 22030-4444. E-mail: [email protected]. Single issue: $6. http://www.gmu.edu/pubs/phoebe] – JQG