The Greensboro Review – Fall 2006
Number 80
Fall 2006
Biannual
Danielle LaVaque-Manty
Don’t judge Greensboro Review by its cover. Though the plain-brown-wrapper-style cover maintains the forty-year tradition of this magazine’s publishing history, the writing isn’t the least bit dated.
Don’t judge Greensboro Review by its cover. Though the plain-brown-wrapper-style cover maintains the forty-year tradition of this magazine’s publishing history, the writing isn’t the least bit dated. The poetry ranges from the dense and intellectual, like Lisa Russ Spaar’s “The Fetish Hours,” which begins by describing a cobweb as “Spangled meniscus, hoarded levee / of dew, milky weird embroidery,” to the transparent and whimsical, as in Matt Hart’s “Matt Hart Running with Daisy, His Dog,” in which “Running with his dog, Matt Hart sucks in / big hunks of frosted air and then forces them back out / like barely visible tufts of pink cotton candy.” The fiction is easier to categorize. The stories in this issue all have richly drawn characters and strong narrative arcs, with one exception—Sarah Blackman’s “Impossible, Your Heart,” which tells three brief tales that link to one another only through objects and geography. In “Apogee,” by Anthony Tambakis, a boy gives up on his dream to be a rocket scientist the night he learns that his father has been cheating on his mother. “The Lord Is My Banner,” by Michael Hart, surprising and wonderful, features a down-and-out narrator who can only express his best intentions through astonishing acts of violence. What Greensboro Review lacks in visual appeal, it more than makes up for in substance, and at $5 an issue, this journal is a steal.
