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The Missouri Review – Summer 2010

Volume 33 Number 2

Summer 2010

Quarterly

Sima Rabinowitz

One of the most unusual aspects of The Missouri Review is the treatment of poetry, the presentation of a group of poems (6-7) by a small number of poets, rather than a single poem by dozens of writers. This issue features the work of John W. Evans, Benjamin S. Grossberg, and Jonathan Johnson. Their selections are preceded by a personal statement, a photo, and longer-than-typical-for-literary-mag bios.

One of the most unusual aspects of The Missouri Review is the treatment of poetry, the presentation of a group of poems (6-7) by a small number of poets, rather than a single poem by dozens of writers. This issue features the work of John W. Evans, Benjamin S. Grossberg, and Jonathan Johnson. Their selections are preceded by a personal statement, a photo, and longer-than-typical-for-literary-mag bios.

Evans, a Stegner Fellow at Standford, writes in his personal statement of the desire to capture in poetry the sense of grief and mourning he experienced after the death of his first wife, and he has certainly succeeded. In an odd way, the accumulation of small sad moments that seem to work toward the poet’s mastery over his grieving intensifies my own, as if I am just beginning to experience the loss over the half dozen poems as he is learning to let go of it. Perhaps this is the way poetry always works, the poet releases himself from the vision or emotion that inspired the poem, and I begin to take it on as he is freed of it. Is this empathy? Transference? Art? I appreciate the opportunity to consider the question.

Grossberg presents a series of “space traveler” poems, what he describes as a way to “expand what he could bring to the page” by creating something more than single texts. These poems offer the poet a way to de-familiarize himself and examine the world as if seeing it for the first time. Here are the opening lines from “The Space Traveler and Wandering”:

Roadless vehicle: means that every
instance is a juncture, that every
path branches always – and in three
dimensions.”

Johnson, whose most recent book was published this year from Carnegie Mellon, presents poems he wrote while living abroad in Scotland recently for a year with his family, poems that reflect his sense of every moment in the world as “elegy.” Here are a few lines from “In Whoever May Care for Me Dying”:

You needn’t imagine
if I say I lived once
on the sea, in the wind
and sun. You’re not yet born,
I hope, so what’s this world?
If there’s nothing for the pain
there’s nothing. Thank you
anyway for the morphine
dripped from the eyedropper
onto my tongue like communion

This issue also features two essays, four short stories, an interview with poet Natasha Tretheway by Marc McKee, a review article on “pastoralism” in contemporary poetry, and a found text feature. I was moved by fiction writer Sharon Solwitz’s foray into nonfiction, “Days and Nights with MS. The Witness Complains,” an essay she wrote about her husband’s illness, a situation she calls so painful in the statement following the essay that “I didn’t know how to incorporate into the nourished and hopeful life I seem still to be striving for.”

M.C. Armstrong offers a fascinating and personal look at the life of writer Ken Kesey, based in large measure on information provided by Kesey’s wife, Faye. Stories by Wade Ostrowksi, Becky Adnot Haynes, Nathan Hogan, and Devin Murphy are consistent with the journal’s editorial predilections, familiar characters and situations brought into sharp focus in the service of a dilemma or difficulty we might not have encountered ourselves, which unfolds in language that is natural and casual.

The interview with Natasha Trethewey, author of three collections of poems, including the Pulitzer Prize winner Native Guard, and a forthcoming book of prose about Hurricane Katrina, would seem to illuminate this understanding of the work of literature: “Poetry’s about empathy…it’s an opportunity for us to engage with things we might not have thought about.”
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