Quarter After Eight – 2004/2005

Quarter After Eight describes itself as publishing “some of the most innovative and significant experimental prose in contemporary letters.” This issue contains plenty of prose poetry and flash fiction, but the pieces that strike me as most unusual and interesting are the longer ones. Karrie Higgins’s essay, “State Lines,” about her epilepsy, is a standout.

Quarter After Eight describes itself as publishing “some of the most innovative and significant experimental prose in contemporary letters.” This issue contains plenty of prose poetry and flash fiction, but the pieces that strike me as most unusual and interesting are the longer ones. Karrie Higgins’s essay, “State Lines,” about her epilepsy, is a standout. “People are offended at my anger when the ambulance takes me away,” she writes, “or when I find a spoon was shoved between my teeth, or that strangers wrapped their arms around my torso to try and hold me still […] There is a breakdown of borders, a sense that this body can be touched and stroked without permission.” It’s hard to decide whether Rebecca Cook’s fascinating “Stories in the Shape of Objects” is fiction or nonfiction. Its narrator calls it a story, but it moves ruminatively, like an essay. In “Magnolia Lyric,” Erin T. Pringle introduces her tale through fragments that only make sense once the second, more conventional half of the narrative has been absorbed. In addition to a wide variety of prose, this issue contains an adequately (though not beautifully) reproduced center art gallery, an interview with Steven Millhauser, and a small selection of book reviews. I’d be lying if I said all the experiments to be found within are successful, but Quarter After Eight lets a hundred flowers bloom, and some of those blossoms are rare and lovely.