Summer is about to turn the corner into August, and I find myself simultaneously working on the stuff I need to finish before the semester starts and continuing to cram as much bonus reading into my days as possible. As in years past, the reading pile is tall and varied, and even includes issues of literary journals I subscribe to, but don’t always keep up with during the school year. Once again, I find myself catching up on Crab Orchard Review (V. 20. No. 2: “20 Years: Writing About 1995-2015”) and finding some real gems I want to make sure my vast and curious readership is aware of.
The lead-off short story, “A Recipe for Mice,” by Amy Knox Brown is so sad and tender and weird and a little creepy! It’s the story of one man grieving the loss of his wife using some uncommon “recipes.” His grief, as well as his anger and frustration with some new neighbors, takes several unusual shapes as the story progresses. I think I might need to share this with my Creative Writing students this fall.
You know, it really is a pleasure to find new stuff to share with students as examples, pieces to get them thinking about the possibilities of imaginative writing. Another from this issue is “Ten Long Weeks at Sea” by Susanna Childress. I love how this poem takes two very different subjects or ideas and weaves them together such that each of the two gets stronger and more interesting. I’ll let you know that one of the subjects of this poem is the giant squid. The other? Go see for yourselves.
Jim Daniels‘ “Filling Out the Health Questionnaire” reminds me to urge students of the pleasures of “found” poetry in all its shapes — the pleasure being multi-faceted — finding, (re)arranging, (re)shaping, (re)combining. This poem is also a great example of finding the profound in the mundane, which has always been, for me, a poetic motivation. The last lines are just terrific: “There is a history of death in my family / that I believe I have inherited.”
I write this from Washington State, visiting my mother on the Kitsap Peninsula, right up the Hood Canal from the Bangor Submarine Base where my dad was stationed for three years when I was a kid. Being here in this house, and going through a lot of my dad’s Navy memorabilia (he just passed away last year and was in the Navy for 30 years; his own father was in for 20), has me perhaps especially primed to love Jehanne Dubrow’s poems, “[To A Navy Wife, in Maryland]” and “Reunion Porn.” The creepy voyeurism of “Reunion Porn,” accompanied by “the itch / of empathy” is very affecting.
I am a sucker for persona poems, and it’s an assignment I almost always give in poetry workshops I teach, so of course I enjoyed Tom C. Hunley’s “Officer Down,” in the voice of the Simpsons’ Chief Wiggum. It turns out to be quite a tender poem, about the Chief’s love for his son, the goofy Ralph Wiggum.
Finally, I loved J.D. Smith’s “Zombie Requiem,” which I will share with my students as an example of one way to write a successful political poem. The poem’s argument here is sneaky — and I guess its moves, although free-verse, are almost sonnet-like in the unfolding of its argument and its turn at the end.
Crab Orchard Review has always been one of my favorite literary journals — I always find memorable work between its covers, they pay writers, and their editors are first-rate literary-community citizens. I hope you’ll join me in celebrating and supporting their important work.
Liz Ahl 