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2River View – Spring 2008

Volume 12 Number 3

Spring 2008

Quarterly

Micah Zevin

Colorful, penetrating art, theory and a treasure trove of poems is what comprises a major portion of this issue. Before reading these poems (about politics, a chicken, even the floors of a nasty bathroom stall off the New Jersey Turnpike), we are introduced to the artwork of Jackie Skrzynski: startlingly stark paintings of children in various states of action and repose with titles like “Cold Comfort” and “Boy Napping with Bears.” These pieces are a great first course of what is to come when we are presented with audio of the authors reading their poems on the pages ahead.

Colorful, penetrating art, theory and a treasure trove of poems is what comprises a major portion of this issue. Before reading these poems (about politics, a chicken, even the floors of a nasty bathroom stall off the New Jersey Turnpike), we are introduced to the artwork of Jackie Skrzynski: startlingly stark paintings of children in various states of action and repose with titles like “Cold Comfort” and “Boy Napping with Bears.” These pieces are a great first course of what is to come when we are presented with audio of the authors reading their poems on the pages ahead.

In Mark Edmund Doten’s “Bush at War: The Sea,” the reader is presented with a fantastical almost fictional and romantic depiction of a Bush war as if it were somehow equivalent to World War II or a poster of an idealistic war fought in the 1950s:

We listened for news. There would be little news, even in success the battles kept secret. We watched on TV as maps of the world changed colors. We wondered what it meant. Our fathers worked in the factory, everyone was doing their part. We played cowboys and Indians under the sycamore trees, we swam in the river, we posted stickers and opened cans of stew.

In Richard Garcia’s “Your Chicken,” the idea of writing a poem about the convenience of having a chicken as a pet and then eating that chicken becomes a feast of profound absurdity:

When it is time to eat your chicken
do not give in to the hand-held blender of regret.
The hand-held blender of regret
will only confuse you with its poisonous blur.

“Gas Station Men’s Room—RTE 17, Paramus, NJ” by S. Thomas Summers invites us into the sullied world of a men’s room and all the sordid paraphernalia one finds strewn across its disgusting floors: “The hieroglyphics of pornography festoon / the room. Drizzles of blood scale the garbage can.”

And you too can continue to drown in the wonderful, realistic and humorous worlds created in the vivid poems you will encounter in 2River View.
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