Florida English – 2009

For this issue, the overall theme can be summed up in T. Allen Culpepper’s poem “My Life Is Not a Very Good Poem,” which starts, “My life seldom rhymes / (or reasons either, for that matter).” The genres in this issue are nicely mixed up in the ordering, and the result is an elegant, ever-changing reading experience.

For this issue, the overall theme can be summed up in T. Allen Culpepper’s poem “My Life Is Not a Very Good Poem,” which starts, “My life seldom rhymes / (or reasons either, for that matter).” The genres in this issue are nicely mixed up in the ordering, and the result is an elegant, ever-changing reading experience.

The feeling—life neither rhymes nor reasons—permeates the fiction pieces. Laura Albritton has her main character fall in love with an addict; Michael W. Cox gives us two characters who “talked a little…but it wasn’t what they said that made the difference, it was just how the two could be together, in one another’s presence, and feel like things were right.”

I like many of the poems, especially one of Brian Dickson’s poems, “Reaping What Comes” and Bill Boggs’ “Pitchin’ Shit,” with its images that stink “so bad you can touch” them, as Culpepper so eloquently put it. Boggs gives us a smelly image by opening his poem with

Think: heifer pens waist
deep in manure,
so bad the cattle scraped
their backs on the beams.

Victoria Feddon’s poem “When You Leave, Then Return” and Charles Marr’s poems “Dumb Luck” and “Tampa Bay” are also notable.

The nonfiction pieces of this issue are all critical articles which offer something a little different. Renae R. Applegate House gives us an essay about the grotesque female body in Southern literature, particularly in reference to Lee Smith’s short story “The Southern Cross”; Michelle B. Gaffey evaluates salvation and historical change in Lola Ridge’s “The Ghetto”; Lillian Schanfield’s essay about translating Yiddish reads more like a memoir at times, which is in no way a bad thing, and G. St. John Stott gives us an essay on J. M. Coetzee’s Disgrace.

As a reader who enjoys a variety of works, I appreciate that there are no defining lines between the genres in this journal’s arrangement, and that, in fact, the pieces aren’t even identified by genre in the body of the journal; the only distinctions between each are made in the table of contents. This allowed me as a reader to move ubiquitously from one piece to the next as I read along. I didn’t need to be overtly aware I was crossing any “literary borders” to enjoy the fine writing in this magazine.
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