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Arts & Letters – Spring 2004

Journal of Contemporary Culture

Issue 11

Spring 2004

Sima Rabinowitz

I’m hooked. I was a sporadic reader of Arts & Letters, but no longer. I’ve just finished this issue and I can’t wait for the next one. I read from cover to cover, not tempted to skip or skim or even come back to something later — every piece, from the A&L Prize for Drama winner, “Left” by Sourbah Chatterjee, to reviews of work by Judson Mitcham, Annie Finch, and Vivian Shipley drew me in and satisfied me. With so few opportunities to read new play scripts, I was thrilled to read Chatterjee’s clever one-act play about a family of siblings, abandoned by their father as children and their adult solution to father-less-ness. I’d call Chatterjee’s piece a highlight of the issue, if it weren’t for the fact that it is followed by fiction, nonfiction, and poems that could all easily qualify as highlights. There is a delightful interview with Janisse Ray, author of The Ecology of a Cracker Childhood and Wild Card Quilting: Taking a Chance on Home; pleasing, read-me-more-than-once fiction by Janice Eidus, Barbara Haines Howett, Gloria DeVidas Kirchheimer, among others; and read-again-and-again poems from Jesse Lee Kercheval, Roy Jacobstein and others, including newcomer, Israeli poet Rosebud Ben-oni. – SR

I’m hooked. I was a sporadic reader of Arts & Letters, but no longer. I’ve just finished this issue and I can’t wait for the next one. I read from cover to cover, not tempted to skip or skim or even come back to something later — every piece, from the A&L Prize for Drama winner, “Left” by Sourbah Chatterjee, to reviews of work by Judson Mitcham, Annie Finch, and Vivian Shipley drew me in and satisfied me. With so few opportunities to read new play scripts, I was thrilled to read Chatterjee’s clever one-act play about a family of siblings, abandoned by their father as children and their adult solution to father-less-ness. I’d call Chatterjee’s piece a highlight of the issue, if it weren’t for the fact that it is followed by fiction, nonfiction, and poems that could all easily qualify as highlights. There is a delightful interview with Janisse Ray, author of The Ecology of a Cracker Childhood and Wild Card Quilting: Taking a Chance on Home; pleasing, read-me-more-than-once fiction by Janice Eidus, Barbara Haines Howett, Gloria DeVidas Kirchheimer, among others; and read-again-and-again poems from Jesse Lee Kercheval, Roy Jacobstein and others, including newcomer, Israeli poet Rosebud Ben-oni. – SR

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