The Bellingham Review – Fall 2006

An elegantly slim volume, the Fall 2006 Bellingham Review is an eclectic collection with the slight political edge of interviews with two poets: Gerald Stern: “So I don’t know where all my leftist influence comes from, maybe it was just in the air, but I identified with them. I was a socialist.”—in conversation with Kate Beles; and Robb St. Lawrence’s interview of Rita Dove: “I admire the Star Trek universe for the way it has always encapsulated our social structures and put them on spaceships, and I love the way they disregard race and other ‘differences.’”

An elegantly slim volume, the Fall 2006 Bellingham Review is an eclectic collection with the slight political edge of interviews with two poets: Gerald Stern: “So I don’t know where all my leftist influence comes from, maybe it was just in the air, but I identified with them. I was a socialist.”—in conversation with Kate Beles; and Robb St. Lawrence’s interview of Rita Dove: “I admire the Star Trek universe for the way it has always encapsulated our social structures and put them on spaceships, and I love the way they disregard race and other ‘differences.’” The thirty-four poems include Paige Akerson-Kiely’s compassionate “Greenland”: “Dying is a woman so alone in the city that she does not think we see her adjusting her undergarments as she walks, head bent so that her hair falls across her face like the relief of driving snow just when you needed a reason to turn in for the night.” This issue’s four non-fiction works are high-lighted by Mira Bartok’s “My Year with Audubon,” sure to be nominated for Best American Essays along with Patricia Vigderman’s “Good Manners,” which is virtually a public service on how to behave as a hospital patient. I echo the words of Bellingham Review‘s Editor-in-Chief, Brenda Miller: “May you find in these pages at least a few encounters that change you, that perhaps will sustain you a little while in all the mutable seasons to come.”

[www.wwu.edu/~bhreview]