Quarterly West – Winter 2005

Quarterly West consistently turns out sparkling pieces of fiction, poetry, and non-fiction, and this issue is no different. Steve Fellner’s notable essay, “Are You There Judy? It’s Me, Steve,” is a bittersweet reflection on the impact of Judy Blume on the author’s adolescence. The fiction ranges from experimental to realism, and teenage thieves, dying in Israel, and raising exotic animals are among the wide-ranging subject matter.  Quarterly West consistently turns out sparkling pieces of fiction, poetry, and non-fiction, and this issue is no different. Steve Fellner’s notable essay, “Are You There Judy? It’s Me, Steve,” is a bittersweet reflection on the impact of Judy Blume on the author’s adolescence. The fiction ranges from experimental to realism, and teenage thieves, dying in Israel, and raising exotic animals are among the wide-ranging subject matter. In Misty Urban’s seamless second-person story “A Lesson in Manners,” the narrator’s sister succumbs to cancer, and the narrator reflects, “When your cousin drove his car . . . into a tree and disappeared in a spectacular set of pyrotechnics you at least could circle the site, examine the empty space, contemplate the sudden violence, the absence with its sharp edges. Your sister is being stolen in pieces, kidney first.” The poetry is equally strong, each piece vividly imagined, including James Haug’s “Much Later”: “Smiley / nodded tragically toward / where the wind was going, / taking everything with it, / a pre-worn shirt snapping / around his scarecrow shoulders.” For bonus pleasure, included is a full color center-spread of Terry Rentzepis’s strange and memorable paintings, oddly suited to the introspective, off-kilter consciousnesses of the journal’s literary works. Top-notch work, as always. [www.utah.edu/quarterlywest/] – Sean Bernard