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Fourteen Hills – Summer/Fall 2007

Volume 13 Number 2

Summer/Fall 2007

Biannual

Josh Maday

With this issue, Fourteen Hills has captured at least one more subscriber for itself. Both the fiction and the poetry are innovative and powerful. This is business as usual, judging by previous reviews here on NewPages. In “Population One” by Don Waters, winner of the 2007 Iowa Short Fiction Award, we find a story Cormac McCarthy might write if he wrote short fiction. As a trip through the murderous heat of the desert turns disastrous for the two main characters, we are reminded of how the innocent and the guilty are each a little bit of both, and, in the end, chained to the same fate. John Henry Fleming contributes to this issue with his beautiful and mysterious story entitled “Cloud Reader.” The cloud reader, a humbly Socratic, Christ-like figure, struggles not to betray his convictions when instead he could take the easy way out. This is after the townspeople turn against him only days after they sought (and even paid for) a prophetic word from the mysterious wanderer.

With this issue, Fourteen Hills has captured at least one more subscriber for itself. Both the fiction and the poetry are innovative and powerful. This is business as usual, judging by previous reviews here on NewPages. In “Population One” by Don Waters, winner of the 2007 Iowa Short Fiction Award, we find a story Cormac McCarthy might write if he wrote short fiction. As a trip through the murderous heat of the desert turns disastrous for the two main characters, we are reminded of how the innocent and the guilty are each a little bit of both, and, in the end, chained to the same fate. John Henry Fleming contributes to this issue with his beautiful and mysterious story entitled “Cloud Reader.” The cloud reader, a humbly Socratic, Christ-like figure, struggles not to betray his convictions when instead he could take the easy way out. This is after the townspeople turn against him only days after they sought (and even paid for) a prophetic word from the mysterious wanderer.

In poetry, Buckey Sinister strips euphemistic myth to get at the brutal truth of life and death in “The True Importance of Punks Versus Elephants.” The myth Sinister busts is that of the “internal clock / . . . [that] tells them exactly / when they will die” and the “elephant heads to a secret spot in the jungle / lies down / and dies peacefully.” Instead, “The reality of elephant death: / It’s brutal, sad, and often tragic.” Sinister proceeds to prove this by telling the tales of six famous elephants dying senselessly at the hands of human beings. As he tells the stories, he is certain that his own similar end lies just ahead and knows that his only hope for immortality is to “tell those who will listen / any story [he] can remember / about angels with clipped wings / ships made of dreams that sink in oceans of whiskey / about heartbreak cigarettes / brokedown saints / and how elephants really die.” Sinister weaves lines of life, death, despair, comedy, and tragedy, and yet still manages to find a thread of hope in it all. This issue of Fourteen Hills is stellar from cover to cover, which is simply protocol for this inspiring literary magazine.
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