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Rosebud – April 2004

Number 29

April 2004

Jeannine Hall Gailey

This issue of the populist journal Rosebud features stories by the winner and several close finalists for The Le Guin Award for short “imaginative fiction,” as well as a Roundtable called “Truth in Poetry?” My favorite short fiction piece was Alicia Conroy’s “The Nameless Season,” a runner-up for the Le Guin Award.

This issue of the populist journal Rosebud features stories by the winner and several close finalists for The Le Guin Award for short “imaginative fiction,” as well as a Roundtable called “Truth in Poetry?” My favorite short fiction piece was Alicia Conroy’s “The Nameless Season,” a runner-up for the Le Guin Award. This piece imagines a near future where sunspots, environmental problems, and meteorological shifts have combined to create conditions that result in recurrent “dead seasons,” where nothing blooms or grows. The message may be fairly obvious, but the tone of the story, narrated by a young woman recalling the year she turned 12, had the melancholy tones and deft treatment of a young teen’s perspective of early Bradbury or Madeleine L’Engle. The poetry selection ranges from early work by Sandra Cisneros to the lyrics to the Goo Goo Doll’s alternative-pop anthem “Iris,” but my favorite was “Essen” by Sherryl Kleinman. The Roundtable, which included Shoshauna Shy, Alison Townsend, John Lehman, Karla Huston, Cathryn Cofell, William Stobb and Sue De Kelver, dwelled on the questions: is the lyric poet required to tell the truth about his or her life? What does the poet owe to the people he writes about? What does it mean to betray the reader’s trust? Shoshauna Shy quoted this provocative bit from Ted Kooser’s essay “Lying for the Sake of Making Poems,” about a poet who had written poems about having a fictitious, disabled son: “…readers have been cheated and deceived…It is despicable to exploit the trust a reader has in the truth of lyric poetry in order to gather undeserved sympathy to one’s self…” The roundtable is a great read for anyone struggling with persona poetry and the poet’s obligations with respect to facts. [Rosebud, N3310 Asje Road, Cambridge, WI 53523. Single issue $7.95. http://www.rsbd.net] – JHG

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