Borderlands:
Texas Poetry Review
Number 25
Fall/Winter 2005
Biannual
Started in response to the Gulf War and the editors’
dissatisfaction with the self-absorption of much of contemporary
poetry, Borderlands calls for work that “shows an awareness
of connection—historical, social, political and spiritual.” Many of
the poems in this issue do demonstrate this awareness, though never
didactically. The emphasis here is on the connection, the personal
experience of the larger world, as in Stephanie N. Johnson’s “People
Who Say Yes”: “In daylight, I share all my visions with the streets
of Krakow. / Wander the summer dust and countryside. Rove
cemeteries, / touch names, tomb lettered. Asking, / Are you my
people?” Still, I found much in
Borderlands that by any measure is strictly personal, all of it
lovely. Never pretentious, Borderlands supplies the
occasional footnote, translating a foreign word or identifying a
religious figure. The reviews eschew academese in favor of clarity
and insight. In his review of two new poetry volumes, Bruce Snider
offers intelligent and intelligible observations about the prose
poem: “By refusing to employ the line and its ability to shape,
clarify, emphasize, and generally guide the reader, both poets allow
music, image, and narrative to unfold in a way that contributes to
the poems’ crucial sense of fluidity, one thing always morphing into
the next…[O]ne could argue that the prose poem is often best
employed as a disorganizing principle, everything jumbled together
in its democratizing block of language.” A journal of exquisite
quality, Borderlands is an enormously satisfying reading
experience. [Borderlands, P.O. Box 33096, Austin, TX 78764. Single
issue $12.
www.borderlands.org] —Deborah Mead
Crab
Creek Review
Volume 19 Number 1
2005
Biannual
Crab Creek Review strikes me as a fun assemblage of the
middlebrow to digest: just the right balance of poetry and fiction
so that neither genre obscures the other; light in some places,
darker in others, but never resorting to noise. Sometimes, you can’t
find clear answers. Éireann Lorsung’s “Volans,” a poem ostensibly on
flying fish and their winged predators, offers imagist, naturalist
inquiries (“What is the fruit / of the ash?”) that elliptically give
answer to one another. In Michelle Patton’s “Waiting for My Son at
the AA Meeting,” a mother acknowledges her own dearth of answers as
she attempts to affirm life and will: “I am told we all stand in the
center of our lives / like small gods, wielding our powerful wills /
like clubs, but I have my doubts.” On the fiction side, I can
forgive Tommy Zurhellen enough for his cheesy 80s references to
enjoy his humorous, rock-and-roll-band-at-fat-camp nostalgia, “Love
Stinks.” But the most meaningful story may be “Traps” by Stefani
Farris. For Rusty, a young New England lobsterman yearning to see
the world, the symbolism is obvious, as when he throws a de-limbed
crab back into the water: “No way of getting itself out of some
place it didn’t want to be.” But as the story examines harbor-town
relationships and the influences of family and tradition, it puts
Rusty in a paradoxical bind: For all of its traps, the ocean in its
own way is liberating. For some people, literature’s like that, too.
[Crab Creek Review, P.O. Box 840, Vashon Island, WA 98070. Single
issue $6.
www.crabcreekreview.org]
—Christopher Mote
The
First Line
Volume 7 Number 3
Fall 2005
Quarterly
Incipit: “Having little to his name when he died, the reading of
Henry Fromm’s will went quickly.” I’m willing to overlook the
dangling modifier in this issue’s first line (though many outraged
“writers” did not, say the editors) because, after all, it’s the end
product that counts: seven short stories and even a poem, all
beginning with this opening sentence. They take their time to
diverge from each other—one can only do so much with the will and
testament device—but in the end, you can’t go wrong with the results.
The First Line has done the smart thing, filled the vacuum,
really, by transforming this creative exercise/parlor game into a
publishable collection; it’s just that the collection feels like an
exercise and no more. Most of the pieces try to recreate Henry Fromm
as an eccentric in a high-culture environment, with several stories
set in Europe. One of the better lines appears in Julie Mayhew’s
story of Henry the serial monogamist: “For keeping eight wives in
the manner to what they have become accustomed tends to leave a man
with little folding stuff to pass round when the judgment day
comes.” Another story portrays him as a New Age devotee, another as
a time traveler attending his own funeral. The “Favorite First
Lines” postscript suggests that this line was inspired by another
funeral story, Graham Greene’s Travels With My Aunt. The
First Line, even as an exercise, shows us how writers from
different backgrounds can converge, and remain distinct, with a
shared starting point. [The First Line, P.O. Box 250382, Plano, TX
75025-0382. Single issue $2.
www.thefirstline.com] —Christopher Mote
The
Massachusetts Review
Volume 46 Number 4
Winter 2005/2006
Quarterly
Dark, dark, dark is much of the work in this issue, starting with
the feature on artist Christin Couture, against whose eerie
paintings the rest of the magazine's contents seems to echo. In
these portraits, infants are dressed in elaborate Victorian garb,
looking very much like the subjects of those post-mortem
daguerreotypes popular among the 19th century bourgeoisie, when
infant mortality rates were much higher than today. These sinister
cherubs peer out of somber canvases (Couture's palette is dominated
by blues, greys, browns, and a thousand dreary whites) with eyes
that hint at maleficent omniscience and hands that fondle such
unlikely props as riding crops, gold watches, and something that
looks rather like a little knife. Tucked in next to Couture's creepy
darlings is a thought-provoking essay on dolls by the poet Nance Van
Winkel, in which she explores the metaphysics of dolls by describing
her godchild's rough play with them), recalling her own childhood
memories of one in particular, and invoking Rilke (who had such an
unhealthy obsession with them). Still more elegant creeps can be
found in Robert Wexelblatt's post-apocalyptic love story, "Tinder
Box." On the quirkier but still darkish side of things, Elizabeth
Searle's story "Sick Play" explores one woman's fixation with
exhibitionism, S&M, and powerlessness. More funny than dark, yet
with a decent dose of black humor, is an essay by John Allen that
chronicles the surprising highs and lows of a pair of enormous
polyester underwear inscribed with the warning "DANGER POTHOLES!"
and decorated—as this entire issue might be—with a skull and bones.
[The Massachusetts Review, South College, University of
Massachusetts, Amherst, MA 01003-7140. Single issue $8.
www.massreview.org] —Kim Drain
North
Dakota Quarterly
Volume 72 Number 4
Fall 2005
North Dakota Quarterly is a sprawling academic journal—it
has expanded by 50 pages since I reviewed it last year—but it knows
how to put its enormity to good use. Thoughtful essays, reviews, and
criticism are givens, but this issue gives opportunity to illuminate
the fiction and poetry that tends to get overshadowed. The highlight
is three short stories, three, by Robert Day. While two of
them are fairly cosmopolitan, the other one, “The One-man Woodcutter
Meets His Widowmaker,” decidedly belongs to the rugged West. Day’s
territory in Kansas serves as battleground for the perpetual
skirmishes between the sexes. The woodcutter’s widow has promises
she doesn’t know whether to keep, and her nagging, folksy narrative
is a struggle to confront her secrets while respecting her husband’s
wishes. “He was always making me promise something,” she says.
“Don’t give more than a dollar at church. Promise to fix me bierocks
for supper on Saturday. Don’t tell those women in Cottonwood
anything about us.” I leave it to the women to judge Day’s use of
the female perspective, but his mythical world is all his own. Among
the essays in NDQ, Robert Bagg’s critical assessment of
undervalued poet Richard Wilbur is the most academic; Kevin
Oderman’s “Selling,” a travel essay, is the smartest. The timeless
“human face as mask” conceit gets, if you will, a facelift at a
cremation ceremony in Bali, where Oderman studies the selling power
of the facial expression, whether selling merchandise or an emotion,
the very act is given attention in overflowing prose. He writes: “It
helps to have looked at the dead to know how living shows. It is in
motion, yes, but not only. Like sun-struck water rippling over
stones, it’s not wholly transparent.” All of this out of little
Grand Forks? Believe. [North Dakota Quarterly, University of North
Dakota, Grand Forks, ND 58202-7209. Single issue $8.
www.und.nodak.edu/org/ndq] —Christopher Mote
Parthenon
West Review
Number 3
Fall 2005
Biannual
I don’t know if this magazine dropped out of the sky or sprung
from the mud, but few have shown what Parthenon West Review
has to offer: a fully-formed poetry magazine whose vision is
frightening to behold. Coming in at under 200 pages, a weekend is
too little time to get through this mammoth. If San Francisco is the
city where West meets East, PWR takes advantage of the label,
building on its Zen-influenced roots in modernism, imagism and the
Beats, approaching the avant-garde without leaving contemporary
conventions behind. This excerpt from Rusty Morrison is an exemplar:
What waking requires, the firmly
maintained distinction,
begins in silence. Cotton blouse, buttered
toast, favored window. Do not look
out from it. Chance
is the blue eye turning
brown in each etymology.
Translations of poets from Vietnam, Korea and China, outsiders
and controversial in their homelands, reinforces the art of poetry
as cultural nexus. Other highlights: a traditional sonnet about
inner-city domestic violence (“Girls Night Sonnet” by Ishle Yi Park)
and an examination of living “the myth / of one who has no need to
live by myth” (Thomas Cantonella’s “Loneliness”). As a bonus on the
translation front, John Felstiner provides a look at the
environmental vision of Pablo Neruda and his love of Macchu Picchu,
part hagiography, full insight. If translators are traitors, they
commit theft of Promethean order: we mere mortals are ever grateful.
[Parthenon West Review, 15 Littlefield Terrace, San Francisco, CA
94107. Single issue $12.
www.parthenonwestreview.com/] —Christopher Mote
Southwest
Review
Volume 90 Number 4
Fall 2005
Quarterly
Joshua Harmon’s lead-off essay is titled “Live Free (Or Die
Trying).” Yes, it’s a skewed reference to New Hampshire, and to the
political divide in the U.S. and the secessionist fantasies
entertained by blue-staters. Yet Harmon, a self-described
“Mass-hole” and shrewd observer of place (see AGNI No. 60),
discovers that voting patterns are not so easily explained when he
visits a region he knows well, Coos County, NH—an otherwise
conservative area in the rural mountains that John Kerry won in
2004. It’s as much about analysis as trying to remember Coos
(CO-ahs) personally, and the one thing that tugs at Harmon is the
widespread real estate development that has made the county almost
unrecognizable. He concludes: “That we feel truly free only through
ownership and exclusion seems an accurate summary of the 2004
election.” If the essay is initially political, ultimately it
becomes something else, rich in detail and still cautionary. Which
seems apt enough to be the Southwest Review’s working
formula. It applies also to Hugh Sheehy’s short story, “Harold Plays
the Pauper,” which pokes gentle fun at 1950s university romantics,
as well as Israeli writer Aharon Appelfeld’s tale of a man’s
struggles against the will and memory of his parents. As for
avant-garde composer Luigi Nono, I’m not averse to experimental
music, but Wayne Koestenbaum’s interlude hams it up too much for me
(though that may be the whole point). To borrow a line from Bill
Christophersen on the bluegrass fiddle, “Half the challenge is
knowing when not to play.” Ninety years on, the Southwest Review
continues to showcase cornucopias of explorative writing. [Southwest
Review, Southern Methodist University, P.O. Box 750374, Dallas TX
75275-0374. Single issue $6.
www.southwestreview.org] —Christopher Mote
The
Spoon River Poetry Review
Volume 30 Number 2
Summer/Fall 2005
Biannual
When I write a review, I try to organize it around the distinct
pillars in the book that define the reading experience for me. With
The Spoon River Poetry Review, that doesn’t work so well. There
are as many writing styles as there are poets in this volume.
Pillars here are like museum artifacts: free-standing, but still
awesome to look at. Three of the best: first, a spotlight on
Illinois poet Gale Renee Walden, who explains how her love of music
influenced her poetry: “I read poems by what meter I thought they
were in: 3/4 or 4/4 and I found myself liking poetry that switched
meter. I like noticing when language moves into a different key.”
Next, the SRPR contest winners, longer poems that stand on
the shoulders of giants, which include a feminist reconstruction of
Tolstoy’s “The Porcelain Doll.” The last is a review, “Six Volumes
of Contemporary Greek Poetry,” which could serve well the
international lit types with the time and resources to find the
volumes examined. And even with these mentions, I’m still
short-changing the talents whose names I recognize (Daneen Wardrop,
Melody S. Gee) and the names everyone knows (Bertolt Brecht in
translation), all of whom play their own special part. One standout,
a translation of Rene Guy Cadou, succeeds in adding flavor to the
manuscript by twisting an already twisted metaphor into a simile:
A manuscript that is but a distressing page
Where man and his
anguish lie flat on their backs
Like the far corner of an attic
lit by apples
Where a six year old child sits with his mutilated
toy.
[The Spoon River Poetry Review, 4240 English Department, Illinois
State University, Normal, Illinois 61790-4240. Single issue $10.
www.litline.org/spoon] —Christopher Mote
The
Threepenny Review
Number 104
Winter 2006
Quarterly
The contributors list for The Threepenny Review reads like
a Who’s Who of the literary world, with contributions in this issue
alone by A.L. Kennedy, W.S. DiPiero, Jill McDonough and Anne Carson.
The poetry and fiction featured in this issue impress with beauty
and simplicity—you won’t need to Google a thing. Bernardo Atxaga’s
“Four Times Snow,” a short fiction piece describing four snow
storms, each twenty years apart, stuns the reader with its quiet
power: “The first time, it arrived suddenly and the flakes began to
fall slowly like butterflies, white butterflies mainly, and the old
woman who used to take care of us looked out of the kitchen window
and, with a laugh that rose up from the very depths of her belief
the way a flame rises up from the ashes, she exclaimed, How can
people say there’s no God; then, like someone keeping time, she
lowered her hand to her apron and gave the signal for a silence to
begin, a silence that gradually covered everything.” But many
journals offer compelling literature. What sets The Threepenny
Review apart from other little magazines is its cultural essays.
A frequent feature of this journal is the symposium, a series of
essays on a single topic. The essayists in this issue focus on plot,
many writing to defend plot from its current disfavor, although
Geoff Dyer chimes in to denigrate plot some more. Other essays
tackle unexpected topics—music and pain, Dylan’s worst song, the
placebo effect—with insight and lucidity. Treat yourself to a
subscription to The Threepenny Review. It’s a bit like the
New Yorker, only without the self-importance and the umlauts.
[The Threepenny Review, P.O. Box 9131, Berkeley, CA 94709. Single
issue $7.
www.threepennyreview.com] —Deborah Mead
Virginia
Quarterly Review
Volume 82 Number 1
Winter 2006
Quarterly
The current issue of VQR
features a hefty portfolio on AIDS in Africa. Strong work in this
section includes "Nightgirls," an essay by Jann Turner about a group
of prostitutes who live and work at a truck stop in Mozambique along
what's known locally as "the corridor of death," on account of the
astronomically high incidence of AIDS. Turner questions these women
(some of them mere girls) about things like condom-use and "job
satisfaction," at the same time as she examines her own role as a
journalist in this tragic setting—is she a parasite? a voyeur? In
the portfolio there are also photo portraits of AIDS victims taken
by Gideon Mendel. His subjects come from South Africa and
Mozambique, and each one poses in front of the same simple
background: a monochromatic wall against which a black duct-tape
"frame" has been hastily stretched. These people's expressions are
as straightforward as the stories they tell in small but potent
"blurbs" under each portrait. As a result of this intense honesty,
the photographs give insight not so much into the horror of AIDS as
into the beauty of human dignity. There's good work outside of the
portfolio section as well, in particular Kenyan writer Binyavanga
Wainaina's dizzyingly dense short story "Ships in High Transit,"
about what you might call a post-modern meta-culture clash in a
Kenyan tourist town. Lighter fare includes a sweet coming-of-age
story by John McNally, and another slightly edgier coming-of-age
story by Steve Almond. But perhaps my favorite work in the entire
issue is a set of three brief poems by Amaud Jamaul Johnson—potent
yet elegant, these manage to pack history, race, murder, and love
into a few graceful lines without the least bit of strain. [Virginia
Quarterly Review, One West Range, P.O. Box 400223, Charlottesville,
VA 22904-4223. Single issue $11.
www.vqronline.org
]
—Kim Drain
P.O. Box 1580