Christie Hodgen

Like the last one I read, this New Letters Journal, from University of Missouri-Kansas City, had some notable highlights. In fiction, Bradley Buzzle's In the Shadow of the Architect features an odd young girl with a twisted sense of friendship that leads her to manipulate a lonely neighborhood boy into digging up her yard to find the body of her deceased father. There's no body, but that doesn't preclude the event from leaving the boy with lasting scars. Maurya Simon offers a triptych of poems. Among them - Requiem, a child reexamines her mother though the woman's fantastical paintings, and Saturday Night Fever, featuring zombies discussing their hunger, and Creation Redux, describing God as tired and broken, unable to sustain his creation after creating it. The real highlights for me were found in the book reviews. First, a new translation of [Late to the House of Words, Selected Poems of Gemma Gorga], introducing me to a wonderful poet. And Patti Smith's [Woolgathering]. Both of these books went directly on my list to find.

3 1/2 bones!!!… (more)

The University of Missouri-Kansas City's 2021 volume is one of the better offers from literary journals, particularly the poetry offerings. Kelly Rowe's Labyrinth was a keen meditation on the mysterious cycle of life and death; Nathaniel Perry offers two poems focused on the new spring, replete with wonderful images of and musings on nature; and Jeff Schwaner's Your Death is a nesting doll, featuring Death in multiple forms, each seeking out their prey only to die their own death when they miss the victim because it isn't time yet. There's a good fiction story from Malka Daskal - a young woman is haunted by the ghost of her grandfather's mistress until she learns that he killed the mistress and committed suicide after. The best prose piece is Emily Ruehs-Navarro's essay about her time as a translator in a immigration detention facility on the southern border - if only more people would tell these stories, and more would read them.… (more)