A Literary Thoroughbred

Crazyhorse has a substantial history – it’s been around for fifty years, and with the College of Charleston’s Department of English for the past ten years – but it doesn’t feel mired in tradition.  (In case you’re wondering about the name, which seems a little odd for a Southern journal, North Dakota poet Tom McGrath founded the journal in 1960.)  Crazyhorse features a spacious format and design: The magazine is a little wider than the more-typical 8x5 lit-mag format. This wider, square format allows for prose to run in two columns, and for poems to let their long lines stay long. 

Crazyhorse usually features striking cover art, and this issue is no exception, with Michael Davidson’s photomicrograph of a molecule of Belgian beer. It looks like a close-up of a sharp-petaled flower in a nighttime rainstorm – compelling and beautiful.

This issue feels equally weighted with short stories and poems, and a little lighter on essays.  For fiction, Marjorie Celona’s “All Galaxies Moving,” which won the 2010 Crazyhorse Fiction Prize, opens the issue.  It’s a compact, surreal story of three lonely characters – Myna the calligraphy teacher, teenage misfit Bryce, and fat man Fry – intersecting and changing one another’s lives.  The setting is mildly strange: Myna’s yellow house, with a huge front yard and only six inches of backyard, sits across the street from Yellow Market.  The story hurtles toward a death, but not the one we’re expecting.  It seems fitting that Aimee Bender, final judge for this contest, chose this story, which shares a little of Bender’s surreal style.

The issue also features two family stories, from Julie Chinitz and George Singleton. Chinitz’s charming, sad story, “Lou Rosenthal’s Answer to Harold Rosenthal’s Complaint (1980)” describes a feud between two middle-aged brothers, in the form of a legal document. In Singleton’s “Bait,” narrator Jerry recalls the 1968 summer his much older, troubled stepbrother, Frankie, comes to visit his family outside Norfolk, Virginia.  Frankie behaves badly and doesn’t last long in Virginia, but he gives Jerry a new understanding of his mother and himself.

Rebecca Makkai’s more contemporary story, “The November Story,” gives us reality TV (a Bravo- or TLC-style competition among artists forced to live together and create art on demand) through the eyes of a producer whose job it is to coax ridiculous, emotional lines out of the contestants, and to pump up the show’s drama with feuds and love triangles.  The narrator also describes her slow-motion breakup: her partner, Beth, camps out on the couch in their short-term apartment, failing to explain what’s gone wrong with their relationship.  The story has an immediate, wry tone; it’s a funny meditation on love and loss.

And Dennis McFadden’s “Blue Side Up” is a stunner, a story firmly grounded in its time and place: 1941, Russellville, Arkansas, where the narrator and his best friend Steve have been sent for pilot training.  But it’s also dreamy, narrated in second person, conveying a sense that the story’s sad past events keep happening over and over, intruding on the present.  Waiting to get to the “real” war, these two friends battle for the attention of Zona, a young war widow.  Zona invites the two for Thanksgiving dinner; they get drunk together, and the narrator loses Zona to Steve.  There’s a melodramatic climax that involves a house fire, but it feels suited to the piece.

The issue’s poetry includes the Crazyhorse Poetry Prize winner “Extinction Event,” by Juliet Patterson, a spare poem that dwindles in size as it progresses.  (Larissa Szporluk chose the winning poem.)

“To burst in your mind with costly grace.

To mass in your faceted syllables.

The arrested movement of time; hours

in clusters, overripe.”