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Ontario Review – Spring/Summer 2005

Number 62

Spring/Summer 2005

Sima Rabinowitz

Smack dab in the center of the issue is a portfolio of Marion Ettlinger’s extraordinary portraits of writers, sixteen powerful photographs that, like the work featured in this issue, suggest an intriguing variety of ways of interacting with the world—head on, sideways, with resignation, with appreciation. The issue is evenly divided between fiction and poetry (9 fiction writers, 9 poets) and concludes with the volume’s single piece of nonfiction writing, a beautifully composed family memoir by Amanda Bass Cagle, “On the Banks of the Bogue Chitto.” The 2004 Cooper Prize winning story, “Gone” by Glen Pourciau and stories by finalists Patricia Stiles and Karen Lorene are especially strong. While quite different from each other, they have in common an appealing emotional intensity. Wonderful poems by Reginald Gibbons, too, like Ettlinger’s photos and the prize-winning stories, inspire a range of emotions. Here are the final lines from his work “On Sad Suburban Afternoons”:

Smack dab in the center of the issue is a portfolio of Marion Ettlinger’s extraordinary portraits of writers, sixteen powerful photographs that, like the work featured in this issue, suggest an intriguing variety of ways of interacting with the world—head on, sideways, with resignation, with appreciation. The issue is evenly divided between fiction and poetry (9 fiction writers, 9 poets) and concludes with the volume’s single piece of nonfiction writing, a beautifully composed family memoir by Amanda Bass Cagle, “On the Banks of the Bogue Chitto.” The 2004 Cooper Prize winning story, “Gone” by Glen Pourciau and stories by finalists Patricia Stiles and Karen Lorene are especially strong. While quite different from each other, they have in common an appealing emotional intensity. Wonderful poems by Reginald Gibbons, too, like Ettlinger’s photos and the prize-winning stories, inspire a range of emotions. Here are the final lines from his work “On Sad Suburban Afternoons”:

        In front yards, back yards, alleys and dead ends
                 may all these signs convince the distant gods—
        or Fate, or The Fates, an absent “G-D,” a Christ
                somewhere or other, not right here, an Allah
        with gnashing prophets, or a great magician,
                or the chance events that can destroy a life—
        that there’s no need to bring down any more
                than the customary miseries and brief
        illusions of good luck on such old, young,
                 different, same, frail creatures of a day.

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