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The Ledge – Fall/Winter 2007

Number 30

Fall/Winter 2007

Biannual

Laura Polley

The Ledge lives up to its name. Unsparing, unafraid, and with a disdain for pretensions, this journal prefers writing that flashes some kind of edge. Sometimes, as in Kennedy Weible’s offbeat story, “Obedience School,” that edge takes the form of dark humor – culminating in the bizarre chaos experienced by a young couple at a dog’s funeral. Other times, that edge illuminates sad realities like child sexual abuse (Suzanne Clores’ “Scary Monsters in the Dark”) or human alienation (Michael Leone, “Bad in Bed”; Franny French, “The Heights.”) Many of the poems concern issues related to the body, sex, and self-destruction. A few, like Philip Dacey’s “Wildly At Home: Her Rhapsody,” skirt lurid borders: “So I mounted him. / I was on top and he was blind – what more / could any modern woman want of power?” Coming from a male poet, this question begs many responses, not all of which will second its vicarious assumptions. Al Sim’s story, “Big Empty Tuesday,” takes similar liberties, needlessly oversexualizing its main female character.

The Ledge lives up to its name. Unsparing, unafraid, and with a disdain for pretensions, this journal prefers writing that flashes some kind of edge. Sometimes, as in Kennedy Weible’s offbeat story, “Obedience School,” that edge takes the form of dark humor – culminating in the bizarre chaos experienced by a young couple at a dog’s funeral. Other times, that edge illuminates sad realities like child sexual abuse (Suzanne Clores’ “Scary Monsters in the Dark”) or human alienation (Michael Leone, “Bad in Bed”; Franny French, “The Heights.”) Many of the poems concern issues related to the body, sex, and self-destruction. A few, like Philip Dacey’s “Wildly At Home: Her Rhapsody,” skirt lurid borders: “So I mounted him. / I was on top and he was blind – what more / could any modern woman want of power?” Coming from a male poet, this question begs many responses, not all of which will second its vicarious assumptions. Al Sim’s story, “Big Empty Tuesday,” takes similar liberties, needlessly oversexualizing its main female character.

Though The Ledge deserves credit for its head-on embrace of such themes, it falls short of the variety one might expect from a would-be catalog of edginess. Five of the six stories collected here (including two of the three Ledge Fiction Award winners) take place in New York City or nearby. Only Clifford Garstang’s “Saving Melissa” – a searing portrait of a troubled, toxic mother – avoids the Big Apple in favor of small towns. Two of the stories contain characters named “Kate” and “Deena” – an unlikely oversight which has the unfortunate effect of undermining both stories. None of this, however, deters from the wide-ranging emotional impact that is The Ledge’s ultimate target. The poems, especially, will have the reader oscillating between laughter and outrage, light and darkness. The Ledge’s best moments merge these extremes, as when Robin Merrill’s catty poem “Buying a Pregnancy Test at Dollar Tree” sidles, almost unnoticed, into the realm of the sublime. Balancing between the safe and the dangerous is the definition of precariousness – but it makes for an experience guaranteed to be vivid, and for The Ledge, that’s precisely the point.
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