by Gray Jacobik
Stevens seems to have enjoyed facing the difficult dilemma of writing a poem knowing that, when it comes to the actual, “sense exceeds all metaphor” and it “exceeds the heavy changes of the light.” He loves struggling to come to terms with the limitations of language. He succeeds, though, at least in “Bouquet of Roses in Sunlight” and quite often: his speaker becomes the Zen Master whose finger points to the Moon, directing our gaze, gesturing toward, as Wittgenstein put it so succinctly, “Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent”.
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The No Coast Derby Girls skate at Pershing Auditorium in downtown Lincoln, fifteen hundred miles from the Pacific, eleven hundred from the Atlantic, and two blocks from the Nebraska State Capitol, a domed sandstone tower locals call, with a mixture of affection and scorn, “The Penis of the Plains.” The building dominates the landscape like something out of The Lord of the Rings, but in lieu of a lidless all-seeing eye there’s a red pulsing light that warns away low-flying planes. That light flashes between the legs of the Sower, a nineteen-foot statue bestriding the Capitol’s dome, frozen in the act of scooping seed from his massive groin-level pouch. Inside, the walls gleam with mosaic murals portraying bull-necked Teutonic farmers harvesting golden fields, their sturdy wives and grim children pitching in. Manifest Destiny is taken seriously around here. Everything is goldenrod and indigo, vermillion and emerald, and the figures in their fertile landscapes hang foreshortened and humorless above the viewer like Titans. The style might best be described as Übermensch Socialist Agrarian. In fact, one of Hitler’s intra-bunker memos detailed his plan to move the capital of the Nazi empire to Lincoln after conquering the United States and to rule the world from its Capitol, under the aegis of the virile Sower.
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Michael Reid Busk on the roller derby, Berel Lang on replenishing the world, Eugene Goodheart on Darwinian hubris, Ismail Kadare on dictatorship, Miah Arnold on teaching writing to children with terminal cancer, Laurence Goldstein on the poetry of Charles Harper Webb, Maxine Kumin, and Edward Hirsch.
Poetry by Francine Harris, Gwyneth Lewis, Susanna Mishler, Allison Peters, and Michael Peterson.
Fiction by Lucy Ferriss, Kuzhali Manickavel, and Rachel May.
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Kumar’s bones were pushing up under his skin like silent hills. His ribs rippled up in hardened waves while his shoulders and wrists stood out in knotted clumps. In the afternoons, I would count Kumar’s bones while he tried to sleep.
“You’re counting the same one twice,” he would mumble without opening his eyes.
“Well it’s poking up in two places. A lot of them are.”
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by Vicki Lawrence
A taut, tension-filled story of a man helping the woman he loves flee her abusive husband, a poem whose technical expertise and emotional surefootedness exemplify the mature work of a poet writing at the height of his powers, and a couple of lively poems exuding the energy and sensibility of a new generation have won the trio of literary prizes awarded each year by Michigan Quarterly Review.
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