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The Dos Passos Review – 2006

Volume 3 Number 4

Winter 2006

Biannual

Sheheryar B. Sheikh

This issue’s first story, “Fat Girl Outside” by Kathie Giorgio, is about an obese woman working in the “Large and Luscious Women’s Apparel Store.” Giorgio uses phobias, image-consciousness and fragmented sentences like, “Underwear that could flap for surrender in the wind” to create a dreamy narrative. It makes the reader side with the fat girl, despise her and admire her all at the same time.

This issue’s first story, “Fat Girl Outside” by Kathie Giorgio, is about an obese woman working in the “Large and Luscious Women’s Apparel Store.” Giorgio uses phobias, image-consciousness and fragmented sentences like, “Underwear that could flap for surrender in the wind” to create a dreamy narrative. It makes the reader side with the fat girl, despise her and admire her all at the same time. Joshua Buursma’s poem, “The Knife Salesman” has visceral outtakes, such as “hand-honed for sharpness – they’ll cut through bone,” and “Are these not the teeth of angels?” Nathan Leslie’s story, “Just Cheese” layers a narrative about two brothers with a subtext of duality and mergence of consciousnesses. It explores the differences between human beings at even their closest points: “Shell’s just like that. He eats things you shouldn’t. Dirt is his favorite, but grass too… When I was five I would never do that. But I’m not Shell.” Karen Hausdoerffer’s piece “Uranium Daughters” stars a group of young girls who shave their heads and wear wigs to exhibit their solidarity with a friend who has lost her hair because of chemotherapy. A boy is in love with the strongest of the supporting females, and his “eyes always ached with the cold.” For him, talking with the girl he likes about her friend’s death is “like poking my tongue underneath a loose tooth. It sent an ache into the back of my head, but I wanted to push deeper.” A fight breaks out, and the boy holds onto his beloved with an unrelenting desire to see her shaved head under the wig. There is Paul Hostovsky’s poem, “Rainbow Chicken,” in which a man “white as Wonder Bread dripping Mandarin” speaks Chinese, and includes “white teenagers jiving in black / vernacular English at the table next / to the next table, calling each other / nigger affectionately, as though it were // the next world, or this world after the next / cataclysm.” Liam Rector is featured at the end of this issue, and his poem “Sinning with Annie” is titled and worded very euphemistically. DPR endears itself with an admirable selection. [www.www.brierycreekpress.org/]

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