The Carolina Quarterly – January 2005

The Carolina Quarterly has great short fiction going for it; I expect to remember at least four of the seven stories here long after I’ve put this issue on the shelf. I was most impressed by Jean Colgan Gould’s “The Queen of October,” in which a woman on the verge of 70 shoots hoops in her driveway. She’s recently had a showdown with neighbors who didn’t appreciate the basketball noise and suggested she ought to do everyone a favor and move out of her big, empty house, sparking her anger and a determination not to be forced to while away the rest of her days in “a nice condo.” Excellent! The Carolina Quarterly has great short fiction going for it; I expect to remember at least four of the seven stories here long after I’ve put this issue on the shelf. I was most impressed by Jean Colgan Gould’s “The Queen of October,” in which a woman on the verge of 70 shoots hoops in her driveway. She’s recently had a showdown with neighbors who didn’t appreciate the basketball noise and suggested she ought to do everyone a favor and move out of her big, empty house, sparking her anger and a determination not to be forced to while away the rest of her days in “a nice condo.” Excellent! A much younger protagonist experiences rebellious feelings in Kurt Rheinheimer’s “Spray Man.” Kyle Minor’s “Snow Fell in Florida” is a short but dead-on look at a family trying to move on and feel secure again after a break-in and, for the woman who narrates, rape. If you’re coming to the Carolina Quarterly in search of poetry, you’ll find twelve poets; most have a distinctly MFA-in-Creative-Writing feel to their work. I most enjoyed the imagery of Scott Brennan’s “The Queen Establishes,” in which a queen bee leads her entourage to start a new hive in a willow tree, where “the living wave [of bees] will come to rest, to suspend the unliving wax / as though on a nail of black and gold.” [www.unc.edu/depts/cqonline]