Breakwater Review – Winter 2014

As the title of the journal suggests, Breakwater Review is the in-between. “We are both the literal space between ocean and shore and the virtual space between reader and writer. And as it turns out, we want to read about other places like us—those liminal spaces in life.” Their tenth and current issue demonstrates this through a number of poems and a couple of prose pieces. As the title of the journal suggests, Breakwater Review is the in-between. “We are both the literal space between ocean and shore and the virtual space between reader and writer. And as it turns out, we want to read about other places like us—those liminal spaces in life.” Their tenth and current issue demonstrates this through a number of poems and a couple of prose pieces.

Terry W. Ford touches on perhaps one of the more universal in-between periods—the time between seasons:

Our lightning-shattered willow’s roots
have rotted into food
for next month’s bright new grass—
the glaring color of last year’s
Easter basket cellophane.

In Yvonne Higgins Leach’s “Dealing with Catastrophe,” the family is tottering on that edge of celebration and natural disaster, and Leach’s word choice and scene construction excellently demonstrates the delicateness of the situation:

Pouring cloudy wine into the wells of our glasses,
my father toasts to our communion.
The soft-lit chandelier splashes
stars on the ceiling.
Glass rims clink, fragile as thin ice.

Another form of “in-between” of this issue occurs when John loses his job in Matt Denis’s “Myopathy.” And even though John is laid off and must find a new job to support his family, he isn’t quite pushing toward finding one just yet. Instead, he puts effort into building an in-ground shelter in the backyard, building a safe place that is his own, in case everything else, too, comes crashing down:

he found a bottle of lighter fluid and signed in his name on the top of the charcoal before tossing a match in. With no wind, the flames swelled without issue and he cut the lamp to sit in the dull orange glow, listen to the hollow crackle almost echoing in the plastic bubble silence of the shelter.

Joshua Jones contributes two excellent poems about speaking sign; Dennis Must includes a prose piece titled “Crash”; and William Hodgkinson, a high school student from Massachusetts, provides an interview with Noam Chomsky about student debt and the free market.
[www.breakwaterreview.com]