What’s in a Name?

Magazine Review by Katy Haas.

Not to be missed in Issue 212 of The Malahat Review: “It’s Here All the Beauty I Told You About” by Shane Rhodes.

This piece is an excerpt from a manuscript in progress. In it, Rhodes explores Shane, a 1949 Western pulp novel by Jack Schaefer; the origins of given names; and the ways in which Western novels continue to “obscure and rewrite the history of North American colonization and settlement and the racism that fuels them.”

This excerpt combines written work, cut-outs of overlapping book pages, and handwriting. Rhodes collects copies of Shane and is drawn to “the most abused copies” with writing in the margins, underlined words, browning pages, and this excerpt adopts this feeling of a much-used book. Each page offers something new and arrests the eye, a real treat to read through.

Readers can get an idea of Rhodes’s style by checking out recently published work from the same manuscript in progress in periodicities : a journal of poetry and poetics.