LIT – Spring 2006

From its bright cover—red and blue feet on a purple background—to the wide pages and spacious spreads of its interior layout, to the quirkiness of the stories and poems found within, LIT shimmers with youthful energy. The poetry is plentiful and tends toward the surreal.

From its bright cover—red and blue feet on a purple background—to the wide pages and spacious spreads of its interior layout, to the quirkiness of the stories and poems found within, LIT shimmers with youthful energy. The poetry is plentiful and tends toward the surreal. “I can see him thinking ‘Great, I’m dying and Mom is drilling through brick,’ / as fever sentences accumulate like juice cups under flashlights,” writes Ange Mlinko, in a poem called “Kidnap the Toys.” And in “Winkle, Winkle” by the same poet: “I had a child’s ear, a child’s Magyar. It wrote me a fable. / I forgot it!” Images pile up, baffling but intriguing. Many of the poets whose work appears here are represented by two or three poems instead of the usual lonely one, and some of the poems are quite long. Peter Mischler’s “Reliquary of the Mouth,” for example, takes a hundred lines to cast its gloomy, hypnotic spell. Poetry lovers will surely appreciate these generous servings. The stories, on the other hand, tend to be on the short side—only “No Vacancy,” a moving coming-of-age story by Nova Ren Suma, is more than ten pages—and there are a few scattered pieces of flash fiction. But length and power aren’t the same thing; it took Christine Grillo’s “Lessons, Senior English” less than seven pages to break my heart.