Green Mountains Review – 2005

The stories and poems in this issue are unpredictable and surprising. They move in unexpected and original ways and come to unimagined conclusions.

The stories and poems in this issue are unpredictable and surprising. They move in unexpected and original ways and come to unimagined conclusions. Much of the poetry is clever and inventive, including Elizabeth Powell’s long monologue of a poem with a prologue and six acts, “Willy Loman’s Reckless Daugher,” a personal narrative built on the metaphor of “sales”; Maurya Simon’s, “Brackets Make a Racket,” ten bracketed lines that begin “[because even silence disrupts silence]”; and Oliver Rice’s “News for the U.S.,” a dialogue between six voices. I wasn’t sure I understood the poem completely, the links between the speakers’ turns are vague (and this is clearly intention), but I was intrigued by it nonetheless and by the possibilities of the form. The poems in this issue with more conventional forms also dazzle and startle. This “flesh-eating-beetle” of a first line, for example, by Charles Webb from his poem, “King Kong Song”: “When a flesh-eating-beetle of a tune gets / trapped /inside your cranium…” Other standouts include poems by Laurie Blauner and Timothy Liu. The stories in this issue of Green Mountains Review are as full of surprises as the poetry, including Matt Nelson’s historical fiction, “The Horses of Great Men,” and Amanda Rea’s exceptional story, “Housecleaning.” Rea creates an adolescent narrator with a voice so authentic and compelling, I forgot I was reading fiction. Given the story’s troubling premise and heartbreaking conclusion, I was glad, however, that this was the case. [Green Mountains Review, Johnson State College, Johnson, VT 05656. Single issue $8. www.greenmountainsreview.jsc.vsc.edu] –Sima Rabinowitz