Lilies and Cannonballs Review – Spring/Summer 2005
Volume 2 Number 1
Spring/Summer 2005
Biannual
Jennifer Gomoll
If you pick up this issue of Lilies and Cannonballs Review, I encourage you to read the last essay, Arthur Saltzman’s “In Praise of Pointlessness,” first. If you pick up this issue of Lilies and Cannonballs Review, I encourage you to read the last essay, Arthur Saltzman’s “In Praise of Pointlessness,” first. There is no point in my asking you to do so, other than that it’s not your usual strain of existentialism (“Let our gratitude [for the pointless] extend to the frivolous and the tentative, omitting not a single empty yard of large intestine nor vast tracts of uninhabited Canada.”) The journal’s poetry and fiction tend toward the punchy, the cocky. Eileen Hennessy’s “About Eating” is a fine poem on the way each of us feeds off others. In “Selling the Boy,” Jeb Burt has a father sell his dullard son to the devil, and the teen seems better off for having a job in hell. Jonathan Barrett recounts a brawl in “Violence: In a Pizza Hut Parking Lot on Christmas Night, 1994” using ironically beautiful imagery for its subject matter: “Shards of glass stick to his skin / and flake off in his beard / Booze pours down his face / eyes blurring with blood / lashes dripping with winter drizzle.” Although some pieces come off a little too angry-twenty-year-old, I commend Lilies and Cannonballs for having a unique style and variety of voices.
[Lilies and Cannonballs Review, www.liliesandcannonballs.com]