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Bloodroot – 2009

Volume 2

2009

Annual

Sima Rabinowitz

This second edition of Bloodroot, “dedicated to publishing diverse voices through the adventure of poetry, short fiction and creative nonfiction,” features the work of 27 poets, five fiction writers, and one essayist. Poems tend to fall into one of three categories, personal narratives, nature scenes, or personal encounters with nature, with a few exceptions (including a few more metaphysically oriented pieces). David Strait’s “Christmas Day” is characteristic of the personal narrative. The poem begins:

This second edition of Bloodroot, “dedicated to publishing diverse voices through the adventure of poetry, short fiction and creative nonfiction,” features the work of 27 poets, five fiction writers, and one essayist. Poems tend to fall into one of three categories, personal narratives, nature scenes, or personal encounters with nature, with a few exceptions (including a few more metaphysically oriented pieces). David Strait’s “Christmas Day” is characteristic of the personal narrative. The poem begins:

The box came on time
and I signed for it
with a shaking hand,
a broad smile.
Under a brightly lit tree,
I peeled back cardboard flaps
And sorted through a sea
of Styrofoam beads.

Gary Hanna’s “Lewes Beach in Winter” is characteristic of the journal’s “nature poems.” The poem begins:

Winter ice crowds
The beach, pushes up
The sand and folds
Like slabs of stone,
Crystal in the half-
light.

Suzanne Dudley Schon’s “Honeysuckle,” is characteristic of the last category, the intersection of a poem’s speaker with the natural world. The poem begins:

Honeysuckle
Climbing the back fence or
wrapping the trees with leafy skirts.
Honeysuckle
Where our fingers learn to
Pinch just enough to open the base
but not cut the little strand.

Two prose pieces stand out in particular, Josh Green’s personal essay, “The Aftermath: Why I Hitchhiked to Hurricane Katrina,” noteworthy, above all, for its contribution to the growing archive of literary images that help us develop a clearer picture of what that experience looked and felt like; and an usual story by Kerry Jones, “Los Días de los Muertos,” an unsentimental and surprising consideration of the aftermath of a miscarriage.
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