American Transformation

An introductory letter by editor Paul B. Roth in this issue--the first of 2009--welcomes America back to the lives of its citizens, presumably with the election of Barack Obama and the departure of George W. Bush. Most of the fiction and poetry contained within deals with this theme of transformation on universal, personal, and political levels.

The issue features work from 25 contributors, six pieces of short fiction and work from 19 poets. The centerpiece, both physically and thematically, is an interview with Patrick Lawler and a selection of his poetry and short fiction. In the lucid interview conducted by the editor, Lawler describes the writing process and his relationship with it. He talks of a cellar, physically in that he lived in one as a child and metaphorically as the experiences and outlook shaped by that cellar (childhood) remain with him: "My fundamental connection to the earth is far more resonant than most. You see the world differently when you look out a cellar window." This different, personal perspective is the core his writing.

The connection he speaks of is evident in the body of work presented in The Bitter Oleander. The free verse poem "E(cstasy)-Mail" employs striking natural imagery, immediately drawing the reader into what is most likely an unfamiliar place: "In the Chilean village of Chungungo,/ the residents get water from fog/ they catch in a series of nets./In the Chilean mountains/ they harvest the mist." 

Straying from a standard description of setting, Lawler smoothly shares his more resonant connection with the earth. This is even more evident in his description of a butterfly's wing: "The translucent spot on a butterfly's wing/ is the speculum. It is a window/ in the wing where light touches light./ It is what exists between our fingertips." 

Here he presents a meeting of two worlds--worlds so close, yet still foreign. The butterfly is not merely a cute fluttering creature, but a bridge and window for viewing the world. As he says in the interview, "I attempt to write in the between--between genres, between places, between times. I wish to create in the seam between the elements--between seem and reality, between forgetfulness and memory, between dream and dream."

Duncan Murray Quinn's story "At the Ford" also deals with transformation. The story of a soldier, possibly a deserter, watching a woman wash clothes in a river is set somewhere in the Arabic speaking world as a few contextual clues point out, but the identity of the soldier remains unknown, making it all the more haunting.

Rob Cook's prose poems, "The Population of the Abandoned Highways" and "Degrees of Weeping at the End of Summer", contain vivid, thought-provoking--if not confusing--images that caused this reader to spend a lot of time scratching his head. But buried beneath images of a woman raped by dogs and personified tire skins is the undeniable presence of decay found in the ending of an epoch. In "Degrees" the narrator has "driven fifteen hundred miles to watch summer and its rape values sink into the earth. Glucose depressions at Applebee's where he could feel the dying away of money." This summer is America. It's fitting that both poems employ images of the highway and automobiles, as these are symbols of the post World War II American psyche: motoring, frontier, unabated growth, the Sprawl. The way of like that's sinking into the earth.

The journal also features the work of five Spanish-speaking writers in translation, including Jesús Munárriz's beautifully tragic "White and Little."

Anthony Seidman's prose poem "Vapour Trail" also explores transformation. The very Céline-esque piece describes a pair of UFO sightings in California and the different reactions of the population. The reader is given a good picture of how different people react when their worldview is questioned, something that can be caused by or the product of a traumatic event: some loot, some call for help, some resign to death. Céline's trademark misanthropic distance is present in the narrator's reaction: 

"...the flying saucer fades/ like steam on the horizon, is only a cloud, and the tenants/ slam their doors, bereft of the dazzle and doom; for the/ abductors were an answer, a gamble, or at least a grace,--/on the installment plan."

Note the reference to Louis-Ferdinand Céline's Death on the Installment Plan to close the poem.