Oyez Review – Winter 2003/2004

This is a very fine literary journal. It has solid, considered and considerable writing throughout, the presentation is clean, there’s a great section of photography in the middle, there’s a good balance of poetry and prose, there’s no one single style to force an analysis of what type of writing is being championed. It’s good. There are some pushes, too, of course, into stranger and murkier corners.

This is a very fine literary journal. It has solid, considered and considerable writing throughout, the presentation is clean, there’s a great section of photography in the middle, there’s a good balance of poetry and prose, there’s no one single style to force an analysis of what type of writing is being championed. It’s good. There are some pushes, too, of course, into stranger and murkier corners. Heather Corrigan’s nonfiction “Ordinary Assassins” made me sweat in good and bad ways, Sean Padraic “McCarthy’s Rabbits” made me never ever want to drink too much again, and Emily Morganti’s “Story of O” is perfectly hot and shockingly cold in such quick succession it’s jarring. The poetry, throughout, is calmly beautiful, a total shift if one’s on the hunt for more Matthea Harvey, for example, though that’s not necessarily a bad thing: Willie James King, Michael H. Brownstein, and Mary Crow all jumped out and knocked me down, and a rereading brought more to the category. [Oyez Review]