The G.W. Review – Spring 2008

By accident, or by design, I’m not sure which, this issue of George Washington University’s student-led magazine is ripe with food imagery. The award-winning student fiction (called “Senior Contest”) sets the tone with Jessica Deputato’s “Flour and Water,” a story about food, family, and flesh (tattoos) – the undiluted bonds between them. A poem by Andrew Payton, “The Kraft Macaroni and Cheese Blues,” continues the food theme, albeit tongue in cheek, or should I say fork in powdered yellow cheese substitute. Amy Katzel’s poem, “I am Peeling You,” moves the reader from the endless possibilities in the title (eggs? apples? potatoes?) to a more graphic, no less food-oriented exploration (“off my eggshell wall”) and lament (“We did this to each other, / my voice, yours, / Minutes and years, mornings // all the slices of burnt toast, gallons of milk, / books started and finished”). Janelle Holden remembers a different kind of breakfast, one that evokes the flavors of a trip to “San Ignacio, Belize”:

By accident, or by design, I’m not sure which, this issue of George Washington University’s student-led magazine is ripe with food imagery. The award-winning student fiction (called “Senior Contest”) sets the tone with Jessica Deputato’s “Flour and Water,” a story about food, family, and flesh (tattoos) – the undiluted bonds between them. A poem by Andrew Payton, “The Kraft Macaroni and Cheese Blues,” continues the food theme, albeit tongue in cheek, or should I say fork in powdered yellow cheese substitute. Amy Katzel’s poem, “I am Peeling You,” moves the reader from the endless possibilities in the title (eggs? apples? potatoes?) to a more graphic, no less food-oriented exploration (“off my eggshell wall”) and lament (“We did this to each other, / my voice, yours, / Minutes and years, mornings // all the slices of burnt toast, gallons of milk, / books started and finished”). Janelle Holden remembers a different kind of breakfast, one that evokes the flavors of a trip to “San Ignacio, Belize”:

JFK’s momma served us
hot dogs with scrambled eggs
hot breakfast,
oranges with salt
and habañera sauce,
a custard apple that
smiled like bloody gums
with broken teeth.

Anna Harrington considers breakfast, too, in her story, “The Unidentified Woman” (“An English muffin in the toaster oven, dollops of honey and strawberry jam, and a bruised banana for breakfast.”), a scene of memory and imagination. Christopher Higgins considers the flavors of nature in his poetic parable of Christ and Walt Whitman together, “Somebody Threw a Big Rock Through the Window” (“the trees looked like the way blackberries taste”). Finally, Gregory Randall’s poem about Maurice Ravel is titled “Insatiable Thirst” and here the image is purely metaphorical, a thirst for greatness, for enduring melodies, for more music.
[studentorgs.gwu.edu/gwreview]