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the strange fruit – December 2005

Volume 1 Issue 2

December 2005

Biannual

Jeannine Hall Gailey

This new upstart journal from my hometown of Seattle has already garnered national attention and deservedly so. Newcomers crowd the pages next to the occasional more well-known names like Lyn Lifshin and Joshua Marie Wilkinson, and the mix of poetry and prose, with interspersed black-and-white art work, is intense and surprising.

This new upstart journal from my hometown of Seattle has already garnered national attention and deservedly so. Newcomers crowd the pages next to the occasional more well-known names like Lyn Lifshin and Joshua Marie Wilkinson, and the mix of poetry and prose, with interspersed black-and-white art work, is intense and surprising. Consider these lines from Elise Gregory’s poem, “Hummingbirds”: “Open-mouthed I caught / a ruby-throated bird. // She mistook my face / for flowers, knocking / my tonsils out of place…” In a photograph by William Flitter, a man in a plaid shirt wheels a giant wooden cross through a hipster neighborhood; in another, an unattached prosthetic leg wears ankle socks and heels. A moving story about a child and his mother, “Behind the Candy Factory,” is disturbing and sharp. Check out this slim, perfect-bound little journal while you can still say you heard of it first. [the strange fruit, 300 Lenora Street, #250, Seattle, WA 98121. Single issue $6. www.thestrangefruit.com/] —Jeannine Hall Gailey

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