Sunday, June 24, 2012

Relocated!

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Thursday, January 12, 2012

Fire and Ice

2011 Issue


Review by Emily Crawford and Jessica Gilchrist

The 2011 issue of Bucknell University’s Fire and Ice follows mourners as they cope with life after the deaths of loved ones. In her poem, “still,” Lauren Krichilsky writes about a young mother struggling to understand how the world can go on, while she remains thinking only of her stillborn child. The speaker sees the stillborn everywhere, saying, “my baby will be a votive / candle in every church / i visit. i see her among / shipwreck survivors.” These lines show her desperation to understand her daughter’s death as a tragedy that was out of her control. The death of her child has changed her so deeply that she can no longer look at herself the same way. The fragmented structure of the poem beautifully illustrates the pain of knowing that there was nothing she could have done to prevent her child’s death, making “still” stand out as one of the most evocative poems on grief in the journal.

While “still” offers a firsthand account, in “Bereavement” by Dan Haney, the speaker watches how his grandfather’s death has changed his grandmother and morphed his own views of living. Haney writes, “My grandmother would bake me cookies I did not want to eat / And put them in a ceramic jar she always forgot to clean / But she never could remember my name,” an observation that his grandmother has distanced herself from him so much that she cannot remember who he is. While at first it seems like his grandmother is deprived of emotional attachments due to the loss of her husband, the speaker spends the rest of the poem contemplating if the detachment serves as protection. It strikes a chord within the speaker as he begins to question his own attachments to the living, wondering if love is worth the pain of losing it someday. The emotional journey leaves the reader feeling heavy with the thought of what the toll of attachment truly is.

While the poems deal with a figurative contrast, the literal barrier formed by Apartheid in Jessica Domsky’s short story, “Two Worlds,” is broken when two characters bond over their anguish. When Annabelle Thompson—a young, white American working to change the unfair social structure in South Africa—is brutally killed, her mother travels to witness the trial. She becomes acquainted with Lesedi, the younger brother of Annabelle’s killer. Ms. Thompson surprises herself by immediately connecting with the boy and realizing how, much like her, he has allowed the grief of losing a loved one to overtake his life. Ms. Thompson advises Lesedi to make the most of his life, because, “You are not only living for yourself anymore, you are living for your brother. And Annabelle, too. They would want you to live for your people, for the thousands that have died for freedom.” This is a turning point in the story, as readers later see how Ms. Thompson becomes a mother figure to Lesedi.

The artwork in this issue represents death as darkness by pairing scenes familiar to the viewer with darkness, as portrayed by the smoker in “Lighting Up” by Courtney Weitzer. In this painting, a man surrounded by darkness lights a cigarette so that his face is illuminated. The burning end of the cigarette is a burst of light in the center of a dark canvas. The image works as a metaphor for the written works collected in this issue of Fire and Ice: the idea that something commonplace that all are confronted with, like tragedy, can serve to color life in a unique way.

Friday, December 23, 2011

Saga

Volume 74 (B)


Review by Melissa Bierly and Madeline Weiser

Volume 74 (B) of Saga, the art and literature magazine of Augustana University, has an elegant and unique style that reflects its many years of perfecting. The current editor says in the introduction, “Saga is not just a literary magazine but an artistic community on campus,” and this issue offers a glimpse into the richness of that community. The pages are filled with portrayals of all aspects of life, from family to loneliness, first love to failed love, and from childhood to old age.

“Dear Rock Island,” one of three poems by Nathan McDowell, is presented in the form of a letter. McDowell’s willingness to try something new is shared by many of the journal’s poets, and his command of language shows why his work is among the pieces in this issue. Although the speaker says, “I want to tell the waitress to take it easy on me / I’m just learning how to speak,” these lines are surrounded by such thoughtfully crafted sentences. But McDowell isn’t referring to a technical command of language, but to a deeper, emotional silence that conjures isolation, a desperate urge to connect through actions, words, and art.

Steven Scott’s “About Us,” a lyrical prose piece, strikes a tragic note without becoming overly sentimental. The unnamed narrator addresses his friend and lover, Tim, who has recently committed suicide. The narrator reflects on the aftermath of Tim’s death – the announcement of his passing on the intercom at school, the viewing, and the funeral – and remembers the moments they spent together: “I know the length of the scar on the inside of your thigh and I know we used to steal your dad’s brandy and pretend we were retired tennis-pros who had fucked more married women than we could count on two hands.” As we read this piece, we understood that through these moments of reflection the narrator tries to find reason in his lover’s death; he is trying to ground himself. Yet the truthful conclusion he draws is not comforting: “You always told me that nobody really dies. But, I think you really did this time, Tim. I think you proved us both wrong.”

But Saga is not a magazine solely composed of tragedy. Instead, it mixes the melancholic and the pleasant by including works such as “So Sweet,” a poem by Ginny Kay Phillips. The speaker describes the subtle, gentle instants of physical connection between herself and her crush by saying, “Sometimes when you reach / to get a napkin, your cool fingertips / accidentally brush the inside of my / wrist.” These events build one on top of another, a snowball effect that fuels the speaker’s declaration at the end of the poem: “These moments make / me want to be the strawberry jam / on those saltine crackers that you love.” This last line strangely encapsulates our response to Saga. Like strawberry jam on saltines, this magazine evokes both the bitter and sweet in us and can be sampled quickly, making us want to return to its pages for another taste.

Monday, December 5, 2011

The Allegheny Review

Volume 29


Review by Emily Crawford and Nicole Redinski

The Allegheny Review is one of America’s first nationwide literary magazines devoted to publishing undergraduate works of poetry and prose. Published annually out of Allegheny College, the journal’s twenty-ninth volume showcases characters who are travelers of many different kinds and how they find themselves in the end. Michael Winn expresses this best in his prose piece, “Yesterday is a Stupid Name for a Song,” when he writes, “Migration is the only way we can know where home is.” This theme throughout the issue reveals how important movement is in defining a person.

In Julie Woods’s poem, “Germany,” the speaker struggles with her experience in a foreign country. She conveys her difficulties through her everyday experiences, starting with a trip to a bakery to order some coffee, during which she muses: “It comes to me in an orange mug / without a handle. / Fitting, I think, / that I have nothing to hold on to.” The speaker continues to express this feeling of detachment from her surroundings, until she finds an old postcard addressed but never sent. She adds her own address and sends it home, thinking, “When I return to the States, / I hope to meet myself there.”

Without a comfortable feeling of “home,” characters are often left wandering, as in “Buzz Gold” by Theodosia Henney. In this story, Miss Lilith, the neighborhood beekeeper, “up and left one night with her bees, though the hive boxes and her house were just as they have always been.” After a peeping tom claimed to have seen “Miss Lilith’s thick shaping, standing in the middle of her hive boxes without any clothes on,” rumors spread throughout the town. Without a sense of companionship in her community, she feels the need to move in hope of finding somewhere she might belong.

Even movement in spirituality is highlighted, like in Amy Frake’s prose piece, “Jerusalem Is.” The narrator discusses how people and their beliefs enhance a place’s significance. She articulates this by saying, “Jerusalem is what it takes to get here […] once you enter, some part of you can never truly leave.” In our reading, this shows a sense of comfort and the necessity of feeling spiritually connected to a place for those who need something to believe in, and especially of finding a place that is greater than a house or a single physical structure.

This volume of The Allegheny Review strives to create a kind of home for its characters, its authors, and its readers. The pieces therein mostly lean toward the theme of finding oneself and depict the journey that it takes to get there. The sense of maintaining individuality, even in a strong community, seems effortless and fluid, pulling the readers into the worlds that the authors have created and guiding us along on our own quests to find ourselves.

Thursday, December 1, 2011

Spectrum

Spring 2011 Issue


Review by Alison Enzinna and Stephanie Heinz

The spring 2011 issue of Northeastern University’s Spectrum immediately hooks the reader on the cover image’s iron gate, over which a dilapidated statue of Snow White bends. The striking contrast of this photograph against a placid lake scene speaks to the variety of styles and subjects in the works within the journal. Covering topics from personal battles with food to questioning the love and affection of a close family member, Spectrum attempts to understand where creativity fits in. The magazine’s staff lays out a mission to recapture interest and show that even the minutest detail can allude to a far deeper conflict, a battle of wills.

The magazine contains a wide variety of prose, poetry, and photographs, which together create a contrast of imagery and ideas. The selections are often brief, but the author of “Recitative,” Lauren Ditullio, uses this brevity to condense her characters’ lives into the most important moments. Recounting the narrator’s relationship with her husband from when they first meet to long after he has died, Ditullio captures their personalities in crucial lines such as: “He barks orders, and if my eyes flash fire back at him (and they did) it is only because he lights it inside of me.” The story progresses through the narrator’s anxiety, over her husband’s former love, which is felt strongest after his death. Despite the lifetime of significant moments shared with her husband, she, like the reader, is left with lingering doubts of his affection.

On nearly every page, the photographs are a constant presence emphasizing the magazine’s attention to particular, telling moments. “Lake Mist,” a photo by Andy Carlson, depicts a woman enjoying the breeze despite the mist that has fallen over the lake. The image creates a sense of serenity within us. The muted colors of the background draw our eyes to the only brightly colored elements in the photo: a sea foam green flower in the woman’s red hair. The image captures a brief moment of complete ease.

While artists in this magazine make their work appear effortless, Sid Phadnis, author of “0.7MM,” shows a struggle with the deep desire to create and an ache at having nothing for inspiration. With lines like, “If I were a slab of moldable mud / I’d sit on the axis and spin in place / the unformed otter on the pottery wheel,” Phadnis pushes the reader through the speaker’s desperation until he finds solace. It may not come from sudden enlightenment, but in searching the author has created his own inspiration. This poem succeeds in moving past its pressures the same way the magazine has. Instead of searching for a place, the Spectrum staff and contributors have created one. As they recapture the interest of readers with works built from the ordinary, these authors find fresh approaches to familiar subjects.

Friday, November 18, 2011

The Shinnery Review

Volume XVI (2011)


Review by Abigail Hess and Rebecca James

While beholding the winding sapling on the cover of the 2011 issue of The Shinnery Review, readers aren’t drawn to its leaves or branches but to the exposed roots. Likewise, this magazine emphasizes the authors and artists who ground and nurture their work. Lit mags often represent a place to introduce new and upcoming authors, and The Shinnery Review surpasses these expectations. Without outside context for each author such as an author bio or graduate status, this magazine gives the reader insight into the authors’ minds instead of a mere introduction. Since the 1930s this magazine from Abilene Christian University has published prose, art, and poetry from its graduate and undergraduate population. The pieces are organized by author, as opposed to genre or theme, which allows the reader to get to know the authors who have multiple pieces published herein.

Juliana Kocsis has five poems in the magazine. In “Stargazing, Age Five,” a daughter remembers what could be any night from her childhood. Even though the stars she sees out her window are there every night and her father’s goodnight kiss is customary, the poem searches for a way to explain how these familiarities are still surprisingly beautiful. The speaker is able to “imagine / bringing the stars a little closer / to my bedroom window, / tying them down like balloons / with a string of names.” This close examination of personal observations is one way that many of this magazine’s pieces pull up the roots of the poem or story and plant them above ground, exposing the hidden framework that allows it to stand.

By seeing multiple selections by one author, such as the six traditionally lineated poems and prose poems by Tanner Hadfield, the reader gets a broader sense of the ways these authors work. In “August 13, 2033,” Hadfield uses the metaphor of a yard sale to explain the speaker’s willingness but inability to bargain for a girl’s whole heart: “the ad said / let the buyer bare, and I was / knocking on your garage / before even the sun.” These lines are simple and direct, but are not sensational, while in “Untitled” images like the speaker’s landlord’s entrails, “wrapped like a bow around our apartment complex,” show the horror of falling into territory never before experienced. Lines like, “The fire hydrants have burst out of sheer joy,” show the fantastical feeling of the familiar becoming bizarre.

“Funeral at MTWPA,” a short story by Brian Peacock, also speaks to the unknown through the story of a young American boy living with family friends in Africa after his mother has died. Readers can see from the first line—“It is a bad thing to think about Africa only in terms of the things that can kill you”—that relatable recognition of one’s own mortality which is evident by the honesty in this speaker’s voice. By the end of the story he realizes this fear will be perpetual; death is everywhere and unavoidable. Even when his friend feels she must tell him, “It’ll get better,” the speaker’s response of “yes” is really unsure. It is followed by, “her intense eyes begging for her own words to be true. In my heart I was begging too.” Once again an author from The Shinnery Review gives the reader a glimpse of the unseen and tangled undercarriage of human experience, that complicated infrastructure which feeds the evocative poetry and prose.

Monday, November 14, 2011

Stylus


Boston College

Review by Mike Coakley

With all the talk of writing programs, creative writing workshops, and college literary magazines being developments of the past few decades, it is reassuring to encounter a magazine with longevity – one that predates contemporary writing culture. Stylus of Boston College boasts a 128-year history, and its Fall 2010 issue offers works of prose, verse, and visual art that prove creative enterprise at Boston College can survive the test of time.

In fact, the prose of Stylus teems with vitality. In Keith Noonan’s “No Place,” the fifth-grade narrator paints a narrative portrait of his family: a fast-talking and observant older brother, his boisterous and wide-eyed younger brother Grenny, and their parents, whose conflict unfolds behind the scenes, felt rather than explained. The older brother’s voice carries a certain maturity as he traces the lines between reality and the colorful world in The Wizard of Oz, saying, “There’s a talking scarecrow that looks a bit like Pa, kinda stumbles around like Pa does at night when he’s had too many.” From his position at the threshold of adulthood, he compares a colorful, whimsical fictional character to a somewhat darker father figure.

Shorter prose pieces, such as Kevin Valenski’s “Existence Below,” wash over the reader quickly but memorably, proving that short prose can carry heavy emotional weight. Valenski presents a surreal, dystopian world full of “electronic night watchmen … internal circuitry in want of apprehending [a] delinquent.” Stories such as this one feel fresh and new, with the long-time reputation of the magazine used as an effective showcase for emerging undergraduate writers.

The twenty-five poems spread among the works of prose and visual art offer a similar vitality. Jack Neary’s “A Nymph Emerged” details the appearance of a mythical creature in a not-so-mythical kitchen where the speaker “had been chopping carrots” – an ordinary chore interrupted by a fantastical intrusion. Jennifer O’Brien’s “Burns” breezes by in three lines consisting of eight words: “Overlapping dust- / jackets shield from conditions, / pieces sew knowledge.” The lasting power of the few brief lines resides not so much in their literal meaning, but in the suggestion of feelings they evoke. The poetry ranges from realistic to delightfully absurd, from narrative or abstract, from strange to everyday. The diversity of poetic offerings, and the feelings they create, make Stylus a wonderful and worthy read well over a century after its inception.

The Fall 2010 issue solidifies the notion that a magazine need not be fresh to feel fresh – need not twist and contort itself in any desperate attempt to remain chic and relevant. Stylus has maintained its freshness through the diversity of its staff, contributors, and work, and through the way each piece moves its reader beyond the present moment, out of the space he or she inhabits. Stylus remains an undergraduate literary magazine that pioneers the way for others, and has been doing so, perhaps, since before the term “undergraduate literary magazine” ever existed.