2River View – Summer 2012
Volume 16 Number 4
Summer 2012
Kirsten McIlvenna
The 2River View’s current issue contains poetry that moves, most of which ends to make me feel unsettled, as if I need to sit there, take a deep breath, and ponder before rereading—because they are definitely worth a second look. S. L. Alderton’s “The Last Gas Station in Iowa” ends, “As she crosses the asphalt / toward the brink of cloud, it seems // that the van could roll a little further, / and fall off the end of the world.” And Peter Street’s “Another Sideline—1957” ends with “he’d throw them in / and I would watch // someone’s pet melt into nothing.” Carrie Causey’s poem about purgatory invokes feelings of being stuck:
The 2River View’s current issue contains poetry that moves, most of which ends to make me feel unsettled, as if I need to sit there, take a deep breath, and ponder before rereading—because they are definitely worth a second look. S. L. Alderton’s “The Last Gas Station in Iowa” ends, “As she crosses the asphalt / toward the brink of cloud, it seems // that the van could roll a little further, / and fall off the end of the world.” And Peter Street’s “Another Sideline—1957” ends with “he’d throw them in / and I would watch // someone’s pet melt into nothing.” Carrie Causey’s poem about purgatory invokes feelings of being stuck:
Haven’t you tried flying?
Or haunting an ex?
Try taking four steps
backward
in a dark room
and see if the form of skin
does not unfasten.
Trail
like flashlight light.
This is the only way
to get to the other side
Kimberly Horne’s “Summer With Father In A Small Town” has a child-like feel to it as it tells a story of a young girl who enjoys imaging that people who see her and her sister driving in the bed of her car think “what a beautiful dog, what happy children” when, with the context of the rest of the poem, we realize she doesn’t really have a happy family. More poetry comes from Deborah Bacharach, Andrew Cox, Dustin Hellberg, Norman Lock, Anthony Opal, Sue Brannan Walker, and Amy Wright. What’s also inviting about this magazine is the audio clips, allowing the reader to hear the poems in the poet’s own voice.
[www.2river.org]