A Lit Mag as Flowing and Immersive as the Colorado River

I’ve never seen the Colorado River, let alone traversed its rock-walled rapids or draught shallows, but this issue’s content is nonetheless engulfing and worthy of the (admittedly lazy) nickname I assigned while reading it. I’d forgotten how much I like the separation of prose and poems in literary magazines until I picked up this issue. Most make a hearty stew of genres with their content, rather than organize the largest chunk of beef to the smallest onion nub. And since reading a lit mag is nothing like eating food (no metaphors—you should not be eating your lit mags), I appreciated the rolling rhythm of the prose with no pesky poems to stop me, and vice versa.

Still (like stew), the four stories in this 165-page volume were satisfying in their scope:  they included a variety of characters and situations, but maintained styles similar enough to each other to suggest different corners of the same universe. Reading them one after another contributed to this effect tremendously.

The stories’ styles are fairly conventional. Lauren Watel’s “Happiness Sucks” kicks off the issue with a gifted middle-schooler in a terribly average situation, whose flair for ethnographic documentation makes for a fascinating coming-of-age tale. Chaitali Sen’s “The Immigrant” focuses on Dhruv and the importance—or lack thereof—of place. Flashbacks intersperse the unfolding drama of his current situation, to which he is also an outsider, to reinforce his “immigrant” status. Tara, the protagonist of Robert Yune’s “Cottontails,” had a more concrete quest: making a budding sports star unconsciously endorse a product, in a fascinating and disturbing exploration of manipulation and values. Finally, Erika Seay’s “The Great Barrier Reef” plays with a classic scenario of forbidden love with a refreshing—and devastating—contemporary setting and voice. 

In some literary journals, the essays can easily be mistaken for short fiction, save for a clear distinction on the title page. However, though the non-fiction followed immediately, the voices of these three pieces were distinctively personal. They also hinge on loss, whether it be a brother, mother, or pet fish. Kelley Clink’s “Surfacing” documents a sprawling attempt to return to normalcy after her brother’s suicide, focusing on the importance of place and how it can and can’t heal us. Jessamyn Hope’s “The Running of the Brides” eviscerates (and is eventually endeared to) the frenzied bride trope we see so often on reality TV these days. As she shops for a wedding dress by herself during a chaotic sale, the absence of her mother is especially searing. The title character in Karen Maner’s “Hugo” (a winner of the 2013 AWP Intro Journals Project) is a deformed blue betta fish, whom she rescues from the pet store where she works. The piece reflects on the nature of the relationships between humans and animals, and relates a series of amusing and troubling anecdotes about pet stores and their patrons.

The first word I associated with the poems in this issue was “elemental.” The second was “slurp,” as in, the river slurps you up. This effect is largely due to the fact that 11 of the 17 poets have between two and four poems included, or page-spanning excerpts from longer works. They are not straightforward narratives—not explicitly devised descriptions we are often used to in today’s poetry.

My favorite poem was perhaps the one exception: “Leaving Labor and Delivery” by Erin Rodoni, also a winner of the 2013 AWP Intro Journals Project. Its narrative, which is summed up in the title, is still odd enough to be interesting, laden with intriguing images and addictive internal rhyme. And the alphabetical organization of the poems by author ensured that the immediate following of “Postpartum,” by Kate Rosenburg, was a God-given accident. A maternal lens also finishes the issue with selections from Sarah Vap’s “Winter: Aphorisms.”

Four joint works by poetry team Monica Berlin and Beth Marzoni swallow up the reader; the ownership of adjectives and verbs in their couplets often results in a fascinating wrangling of meanings, with that elemental feel that dominates this issue. “Narrow Hallways,” Brent Armendinger’s longer piece in the issue, occupies an undefined space, but speaks so deliberately and returns to itself so frequently that it feels as natural as breathing. Nathan Hoks explores the concept of “the interior” in his two poems; the shorter “Hôtel L’Intérieur” is striking in the speaker’s simple envisioning of his insides as a Parisian hotel, and the affectation of his feeling. “[Pit],” from Jesse DeLong’s longer piece “Echoes, Thus,” takes the experience of daring to eat a rotting peach to a new height of drama.

Visually, the poems range from the multi-parted to the long skinny column, to the disparately spaced to the neatly stanza-ed (less common), and often span two to three pages. They shuffle rhyme and rhythm like Baoding balls without being bound to a particular form. They would be called conventional in sentence structure, but don’t employ a clearly defined narrative, historical figures and events, or pop culture references, at least not obviously. They are more elemental and evocative, philosophical, but rarely overt.

The organization, inclusion of pull-quotes from the prose, and tone of the editors’ notes gave this issue a more magazine-like feel than other journals. An exception to that feeling is the absence of visual art; I didn’t expect to not miss it, since the art is typically so wonderful in literary magazines. The stars here are the stories, essays and poems.

The majority of contributors in this issue are women. Not all list MFA degrees, but all have previous publications, some have books, some have grants and prizes, many are teachers, many run their own presses. However, from a brief encounter at their booth at the AWP conference in Boston last year, I can attest that editor Stephanie G’Schwind actively encourages emerging writers to submit. (They also had fortune cookies, and my friend won a free subscription. It’s a good stop if you’re at the conference.) It’s a journal for the engulfing familiar, the skillful sentence, the exploratory, meditative verse—and like a river reaching the ocean, continues to gain speed.