The Literary Review articles from March 2003

The Literary Review archives from March 2003

Editor's notes.(Editorial)
March 22, 2003... In the dusty stacks of a Wisconsin library, I was reading a 1921 copy of The Little Review, captivated by its early modernist edginess, its primitive type, when I came across a blank rectangular space in the midst of columns of copy. Above it,...

I will clean your attic. (Fiction).(Short Story)
March 22, 2003

Great moments in psychotherapy, number 39. (Fiction).(Short Story)
March 22, 2003... It was linear low-density polyethylene, part of the boom in plastic film products that had, since the seventies, overtaken the merchandising of grocery items. Its resin acted as a gas barrier. It could keep chicken parts fresh, it could be a...

Observations on the Ubarian calendar (from The Books of Ubar). (Poetry).(Poem)
March 22, 2003... Wheel of Shadows A wheel whose spokes are intersecting figure eights, marked A with oval pegs that are topped with eyes painted inauspiciously open or auspiciously shut--what does it reveal to us? First, the two types of infinity--the...

Roman Air. (Poetry).(Poem)
March 22, 2003... ROMAN AIR (after "henrietta and Astrid," a photo by Marsha Burns) I see no reason, I see no reason, says one girl. Thank you, says the other, two small white, two egos, two small white, four tiny hands. ...

Spot, Not Sunlight. (Poetry).(Poem)
March 22, 2003... Spot, Not Sunlight (from a reproduction of "Three Men Walking" by Giacommetti) It is clear these are three girls, very young and slender. Backstage, no one will talk about this, the girls being more or less twelve and...

Trying to say. (Fiction).(Short Story)
March 22, 2003... I am moving my mouth but nothing is coming out. I am opening my jaws and my teeth are clacking and I am trying to push something up and out of my throat a lump a knot a ball a gag but either it's caught or it's permanent and can't come out,...

The other side. (Fiction).(Short Story)
March 22, 2003... Janek Byk had been a carpenter for forty-one years, eleven months, and two-and-one-half days. During unexplained bouts with cloudy vision, he pounded his left thumb so flat he could lick and press two postage stamps to an envelope at the same...

In Season. (Poetry).(Poem)
March 22, 2003... In Season I ran into him yesterday, a poet I once knew, picking over the pyramids of fruit in the produce section, handling each piece with the same slow consideration he may have once reserved for etching his lines...

The Piecework of Writing. (Poetry).
March 22, 2003... The Piecework of Writing --Eidetic is the term for mental images so clear and vivid they are photographically sharp. Shorthand One evening, my mother wrote everything I said, smiling as my sentences sped Into a...

From Phoebe 2002: an Essay in Verse. (Poetry).(Poem)
March 22, 2003... From Phoebe 2002: An Essay in Verse Phoebe 2002: An Essay in Verse, forthcoming in the fall, is a collaboration with Jeffery Conway and Lynn Crosbie. Phoebe 2002 is a mock-epic based on the 1950 movie All About Eve, starring Bette Davis...

"One thing I've got a good grip on is remorse." (Poetry).(Poem)
March 22, 2003... "One thing I've got a good grip on is remorse." --Agnes Martin A woman lets out her dog, walks out in houseshoes and plaid shorts on this cold morning, her hair turbaned in a towel, to pick up her paper. The grass ...

"What is clearest in me bears no relation to what I see." (Poetry).(Poem)
March 22, 2003... "What is clearest in me bears no relation to what I see." --Anne Truitt A dozen white blooms linger past their prime on top of a plum tree, ideas we once believed in, cars coasting downhill on a wet road, tires' hiss...

"She strips naked": the poetry of Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven. (Essays).
March 22, 2003... Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven is to me the naked oriental making solemn gestures of indecency in the sex dance of her religion. Her ecstasy, to my way of thinking, is one of the properties of art" (Scott, 48). So wrote the American author and...

She. (Poetry).(Poem)
March 22, 2003... She Moon Tops Olive Firridge Hazy Waked- Blue Squats Snow- Stirless Brush Blacks Mute- She Strips- Naked [circa 1924] Irene Gammel is the...

Thunder and Lightning. (Poetry).(Poem)
March 22, 2003... Thunder and Lightning Let me drink your lips-- Let me swallow your breath-- Let me taste the perspiration of Your windtangled skin Your black hair cascades In love's throes-- Your face lightning-thunder ...

Analytical Chemistry of Progeny. (Poetry).(Poem)
March 22, 2003... Analytical Chemistry of Progeny My bawdy spirit is innate-- A legacy from my Dada- His crude jest bestowed on me The sparkle of obscenity My noble mother's legacy Melancholy-passion-ardour- Curbed by...

Cosmic Chemistry. (Poetry).(Poem)
March 22, 2003... Cosmic Chemistry "Live and learn" "life = 1 damn thing after another" Life is science- God knows!-- 1 Life = wombcrucible Spirit = phalluspistol Matter = ashes Loss = gain = Purification...

Girl. (Poetry).(Poem)
March 22, 2003... Girl When I was a girl I didn't know I was a girl. I thought I was more of a pigment, an open field, some kind of weather that disrupts everyone's life in the living room. I knocked over the cast iron iron...

Tricks of Gravity. (Poetry).(Poem)
March 22, 2003... Tricks of Gravity What was surprising was the quiet. The neighborhood in twilight, the blood coming out some part of my face, even the streetlights so familiar as if I didn't just crash into a row of cars. ...

The Garden. (Poetry).(Poem)
March 22, 2003... The Garden "There awaits us after we are dead things which we do not expect or imagine." --Heraclitus Fall's last light in the last field falls now-- A yellow butterfly. A yellow leaf... Nothing we haven't lost...

The Leap. (Poetry).(Poem)
March 22, 2003... The Leap "To souls, it is death to become water; to water it is death to become earth. From earth comes water, and from water soul." --Heraclitus Our son stands at the dock's edge eyeing His other self cast on the water...

The Telephone Paddock. (Poetry).(Poem)
March 22, 2003... The Telephone Paddock It's easy to say "this one is for you"--it's a convention, what all fathers-to-be would do if insomniac and sweltering with summer humidity at three in the morning. Gambier, Ohio--you'll be...

Surface Histories: a Town in the Wheatbelt. (Poetry).(Poem)
March 22, 2003... Surface Histories: a Town in the Wheatbelt 1. The horse rails gone, then back again, an auntie tries the wheel of a car that almost looks the same-- searching for gears in an automatic, and caught by...

Mittel Europa. (Fiction).(Short Story)
March 22, 2003... It's a little Dvorak waltz, a thin and pleasant melody that graces the ear without engaging the mind. Sitting at the piano in the lounge of this Prague hotel, Conrad is playing the waltz in honor of the city, but he is thinking about another,...

That day. (Poetry).(Poem)
March 22, 2003... that day that day my father left for Kumchon on the seven o'clock train and my younger sister went to school at nine that day, my mother's worn-out legs swelled like balloons and I went to the newspaper company and...

The Traveler. (Poetry).(Poem)
March 22, 2003... The Traveler He is traveling in the landscape of the living and the dead, you won't recognize him in a crowd; Sometimes in a train when the wind and clouds surge, I think,he will take out a notebook or on a candle-lit...

Penny for my thoughts. (Fiction).(Short Story)
March 22, 2003... I had several girlfriends in high school, and one in particular, though none of my friends ever knew it. She was from the other side of the tracks, taking home economics, art, secretarial, and business classes while I took pre-med, chemistry,...

After Leaving the Hotel. (Poetry).(Poem)
March 22, 2003... After Leaving the Hotel ... we learn how our own history has its exits and its entrances, its waning phase. --Amy Clampitt I Late in a day yet minted by rain clouds as dark as slate and still swiftly drifting in a...

Cravings and Vanishings. (Poetry).(Poem)
March 22, 2003... Cravings and Vanishings The size and shape of things ever did fascinate, the huge whale of a shining black grand piano or the tiniest light green acrobat sort of worm, what is it? a word on a page, a...

A distant death. (Fiction).(Short Story)
March 22, 2003

The year of mad weather. (Fiction).(Short Story)
March 22, 2003... "But the land with which you have shared the cold never again will you be able to help but love her" --Vladimir Mayakovsky The story that I am going to tell you is about my village called Madville, which is famous for two specialties:...

B-17. (Fiction).(Short Story)
March 22, 2003... January 27, 1943. Eighth Air Force. First run over Wilhelms haven. Navigator on B-17 ("Flying Fortress," world's best bomber). On previous targets had fouled up; not this time. Locate Initial Point over city. Attacking Messerschmitts,...

The God Particle. (Poetry).(Poem)
March 22, 2003... The God Particle God reveals in particles, proton, pion, meson, muon and so on, here and there a quark... And now, Higgs boson, the glue, the vacuum, the holy ghost that holds it all together, the last piece...

Ghost of The Living: Oboes at 3 AM. (Poetry).(Poem)
March 22, 2003... Ghost of the Living: Oboes at 3 AM Startled by everything. Shaken by small animals nosing out of fog. There is so much I do not know. And fear. My own breath. My own footsteps. I walk out making nothing, and worse, like it...

Dada queen--Irene Gammel's Baroness Elsa: Gender, Dada, and Everyday Modernity. (Essays).
March 22, 2003... Recent feminist readings of modern art history have emphasized the dynamic role of women in promoting, financing, and documenting Dadaism in the US. Margaret Anderson and Jane Heap, editors of The Little Review, were among the first to publish...

Douglas A. Martin, Outline of My Lover.
March 22, 2003... London: Picador, 2002. Obsession with rock stars, their mysterious personas and high profile lives, is common in our culture, but the delicacy and passion with which Douglas A. Martin explores this topic is entirely original. Outline...

Lynne Tillman, This Is Not It.(Book Review)
March 22, 2003... New York: Distributed Art Publishers, Inc., 2002. The opening image to "Come and Go," Tillman's lead story in this new collection of 23 stories written in conjunction with individual pieces of artwork and photography, is of "a man with two...

Tenaya Darlington, Madame Deluxe.(Book Review)
March 22, 2003... Minneapolis: Coffee House Press, 2000. Some poets aren't satisfied with plain clothes or plain language, they turn their metaphors into absurdist imaging or trace an elliptical line of thought. But, sometimes, they simply paint their face...

Books by contributors.
March 22, 2003... New and forthcoming books by our contributors include: Stefano Benni, Saltatempo, (Feltrinelli, 2001). Rebecca Brown, The End of Youth, (City Lights, 2003). David Daniel, Seven-Star Bird, (Graywolf Press, 2003). Linh Dinh,...