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Red Mountain Review – Fall 2005

Volume 1

Fall 2005

Annual

Erin M. Bertram

Born of a city remembered for its racial fissures, this newborn Birmingham journal acknowledges its Southern roots while stretching branches far as Colorado, New York, and Iowa. RMR‘s motif is unapologetically, if subtly, political, a tender piñata of a first issue. Jim Murphy’s poem, “Open Letters to James Wright,” reminds me how a good apostrophe is to be composed.

Born of a city remembered for its racial fissures, this newborn Birmingham journal acknowledges its Southern roots while stretching branches far as Colorado, New York, and Iowa. RMR‘s motif is unapologetically, if subtly, political, a tender piñata of a first issue. Jim Murphy’s poem, “Open Letters to James Wright,” reminds me how a good apostrophe is to be composed. And Angela M. Balcita’s essay, “You, Too, Can Be Americano,” pleats emigration with baseball and cognates, all in second person. The journal sponsors an annual no-entry-fee chapbook competition, and features Charles Jensen’s 2005 winner Little Burning Edens as a centerpiece. Jensen’s matter of fact vis à vis gaze at the unraveling mortality brings is as long and strong as the boys many of his poems describe and laud. This is a chapbook with its fingers on three cities on the map of the body: Desire, Love, and Disease. The fourth city, and perhaps the largest, Affirmation, is one the poet succeeds in convincing readers to finger themselves. On one end of Little Burning Edens is “Vapor Boys,” arguably the collection’s representative poem. In it, Jensen writes: “Every day the world sucks down more sun / and packs it away […] // that slowly, one of us who dies // will enter the rest of us as a breath [ . . . ] / or a photograph of a gorgeous young man / who smiles with a fire / where his teeth should be.” For Jensen, the body represents more than an accumulation of cells and muscle memory. The body, for him, is a structure to worship before it withers and is no more. For RMR, the same can be said for marginalized written work. 

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