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Green Mountains Review – Nov 2004

Volume 17 Number 1

2004

Jennifer Gomoll

Amidst all the sophisticated fiction and poetry, Green Mountains Review provides a nice regional touch: photos of the modest farmhouse owned by an old Vermonter until his death and the subsequent destruction of his “uninhabitable” dwelling.

Amidst all the sophisticated fiction and poetry, Green Mountains Review provides a nice regional touch: photos of the modest farmhouse owned by an old Vermonter until his death and the subsequent destruction of his “uninhabitable” dwelling. This peek is no less fascinating than the fictional glimpses into various lives provided by the writers in this issue. “Mayday” by Susan Braunstein sets up a dysfunctional mother-daughter tale that defies expectations as each woman tests her sense of identity on strangers at a strange party. Donald Lystra’s “Where Lou Gehrig Went After Leaving the Game” gives us a man who makes nice instead of violent with someone trying to pick a fight at a ball game to impress his girlfriend (our hero invites the couple for drinks, then manages to get the girl’s number. Score!) I suspect I’m not the only writer who appreciates Mark Halliday’s “Not About RL,” a metafictional story in which someone is trying hard not to write about Romantic Love but about something serious: “Serious is mortality, serious is the grapple of time–Stop poking me with that word ‘serious’!” Now here’s a poem that made me smile: Joel Brouwer’s “The Magician’s Tuxedo,” in which a janitor pokes around this costume in search of doves, which magically appear only after, discovering the magician’s secrets, he’s lost his innocence. [Green Mountains Review, Johnson State College, Johnson VT 05656. Sample issue: $7.] – JQG

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