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Quiddity – Spring/Summer 2009

Volume 2 Number 1

Spring/Summer 2009

Biannual

Terri Denton

This is a delightful combination of poetry and short fiction, both in English, and in such languages as Urdu and Portuguese, with English translations on the faced pages. This is a wonderful device, and I found it to be irresistible. Seeing literature in its original form only enhances the translations of it. Could I, I wondered, learn a bit of Urdu this way? Only time will tell on that one, but it’s high time that Quiddity gets a shout-out from the review community.

This is a delightful combination of poetry and short fiction, both in English, and in such languages as Urdu and Portuguese, with English translations on the faced pages. This is a wonderful device, and I found it to be irresistible. Seeing literature in its original form only enhances the translations of it. Could I, I wondered, learn a bit of Urdu this way? Only time will tell on that one, but it’s high time that Quiddity gets a shout-out from the review community.

Kevin Conder, one of this issue’s contributors, is a writer who deserves a standing ovation and a wave – stadium-style. His two poems contained herein, “T.O.E.” and “Winter Olympics,” are refreshingly original, and are fine writing at its best. The former, whose letters stand for the Theory of Everything, is filled with musical allusions that are, quite simply, very cool. He writes, “inside everything lie rubberbands of energy / the strings of existence,” and continues, in the next stanza, “The strings vibrate like music, / an a– note makes oxygen, / a g hydrogen, a c zinc. / One day, we will learn // to pluck them like a flamenco player.” In closing, Conder writes that the “T.O.E.” is still waiting to be born, “still tuning up, preparing to / scream five octaves up the scale / and then gasp for air.” Conder’s “Winter Olympics,” has a theme contained in one ending- sentence: “You will never matter more than right now.”

Joey Brown’s short story, “Darling,” too, deserves to be up on the aforementioned poet’s Olympic medal podium. A heartbreaking tale of an aged woman’s dementia, and her getting lost, is so delicately sad that the reader must, almost, turn away, but Brown’s writing is much too riveting to do so. There is so much more in this edition that should be lauded loudly, but I wouldn’t want to spoil your amazement. Well, maybe just a hint… John McKernan’s poem, “Delivery Truck,” is about the effects his father’s death had on him. The poem is filled with the most astonishing metaphors; for example, he begins with, “The silence inside a bar of soap is slippery / The silence in the folds of a cotton shirt / does not remember Mississippi” then tells us, without costume, “Whenever I play Scrabble I always try to use the words Coffin and Life.
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