ISSUES | spring 2008
31.1 (Spring 2008): "Off the Grid"
Featuring the winners of the 2007 Jeffrey E. Smith Editors’ Prize and work by John Alford, Christina Hutchins, Cynthia Morrison Phoel, Amos Magliocco, Michael McGriff, Natalie Sears, Jerald Walker… a review by Chad Parmenter… and a conversation with Charles Baxter.
CONTENT FROM THIS ISSUE
Poetry
Mar 01 2008
Poetry Feature: Christina Hutchins
Featuring the poems: Confessions of a Tactile Kleptomaniac A Way Back to Life A Traveler is Met By Shapes of the World Interregnum [featured as Poem of the Week, July… read more
Poetry
Mar 01 2008
Poetry Feature: Michael McGriff
Featuring poems from Landscapes with Origins: [In the break room] [Against my will] [The slow child, the small child] [Worm of concession] [This father and daughter] [Midwinter: she doesn’t reach]… read more
Nonfiction
Mar 01 2008
Put on the Petty
After Eric and I survived an F2 tornado in Tulia, Texas, I thought we’d live forever. We rode out the tornado in a high-profile SUV-precisely the wrong kind of shelter-and after we’d crashed into a brick wall and ducked under a one-hundredtwenty-knot jet that screamed through the blown-out windows, it seemed as if the Angel of Death had roared, in a breath choked with debris, and then fled, leaving us alone and lucky.
Fiction
Mar 01 2008
Never Trust a Man Who —
In the sopping-wet spring of 1995, Sylvia rode the bus to and from Old Mountain more times than she cared to count. Her twin brother, Drago, was in Kyustendil, doing his military service, and she felt obliged to visit her mother twice as often as usual. When she had been a student, she’d caught any bus she could, usually from Poduene Station, which was a filthy place, thick with fumes and overrun by dogs, full of stalls hawking cheap underwear and overripe vegetables.
Fiction
Mar 01 2008
Arctic Summer
Even today, I am unsure about a lot of things. I am unsure about what exactly happened to me in Qik that summer, about how much it had to do with the strange beauty of the place-strange enough to put a spell on you. Or how much it had to do with her, or with me.
Poetry
Mar 01 2008
Poetry Feature: Jude Nutter
Winner of the 2007 Jeffrey E. Smith Editors’ Prize for Poetry. The Insect Collector’s Demise [featured as a Poem of the Week August 21, 2008] How to Use a Field… read more
Interviews
Mar 01 2008
A Conversation with Charles Baxter
This generation takes in more information daily than my parents and grandparents ever had to. With the Internet and the screen culture, we’re all living in a period of data smog. Part of what it means to write a story now involves noticing that environment. I’m really interested in the way people do not pay attention to certain things anymore. People listen much more selectively than they once did. It’s a feature of our time that you see people walking down the sidewalk talking on the phone. That’s amazing! They’re on the phone! These things remain a feature of our lives that our grandparents would never have believed.
Reviews
Mar 01 2008
A Review of Seven First Poetry Books
Featuring reviews of: Barter by Monica Youn My Soviet Union by Michael Dumanis Floating City by Anne Pierson Wiese Standing in Line for the Beast by Jason Bredle Sister by Nickole Brown The Man Suit by… read more
Nonfiction
Mar 01 2008
The Mechanics of Being
He confessed everything then, eager, like a serial killer at last confronted with evidence of his crime, to have the details of his awful secret revealed. And when pressed about why he hadn’t said anything sooner, he mentioned his master plan: he would make his sight get better by ignoring, as much as possible, the fact that it was getting worse.
Fiction
Mar 01 2008
Whistling in the Louvre
The smell of insanity: acrid, piss-logged wood. The only way they’ll get rid of it, she told us, is to rip up the flooring. The butch could have done it, too, with her bare hands. A jangle of keys, the reassuring click of a tumbler, and we were back in the hall. My wife, with concern in her voice: But one got used to it, right? No, you never do. Twelve years later, sitting on the hospital lawn, I catch a whiff of it in the breeze. I prefer waiting outdoors. Besides, the sun feels good on my face. Fall is in the air. A typical July morning in New Hampshire.
Fiction
Mar 01 2008
The Fantôme of Fanta
Karl, leaning over his folded knees, gestured with one hand. “He says if we want to climb on the rock, we have to be respectful of the spirits that live there and the ancestors of the people who lived there from before, in villages in the cliffs, and that we should not damage or take anything we find.” Karl turned back to the Chief. “Also, he says to have good experiences.”
Foreword
Mar 01 2008
Off the Grid
Going off the grid can result not just in changes of behavior and attitude but also in discovery. Many of the breakthroughs in science and technology have been the outcome of one kind of research or work-often with a modest goal-becoming something that no one could ever have guessed.
Nonfiction
Mar 01 2008
Big Jim
In the summer of 1955, the year my father quit his job with the Bankers Trust Company in New York City and bought Big Jim Pond Camps-the year, that is, when my father took a flier and did what he had always wanted to do, which was own and run a hunting and fishing camp in Maine-he discovered after just a couple of months at Big Jim that substantial as the place may have looked to the casual eye, it was tender and vulnerable as a newborn baby, in need of constant coddling and attention if it were not to succumb to the heat, humidity, rot, rust and decay of Maine summers, the crushing weight of winter snows, the rank growth of alders that kept marching, marching against this tiny beachhead of cleared land, threatening to engulf it if they were not constantly beaten back.