Blue Lake Review – August 2012

With no more of an introduction than “It’s not all sunny skies and lake breezes. Deal with it. And read the new issue of Blue Lake,” this issue dives in with mixture of poetry, fiction, and essays.

With no more of an introduction than “It’s not all sunny skies and lake breezes. Deal with it. And read the new issue of Blue Lake,” this issue dives in with mixture of poetry, fiction, and essays.

Most notable in the fiction section is Melodie Corrigall’s “High Noon” in which a woman feels guilty about ignoring a phone call regarding her father-in-law’s poor health as her and her husband head out on vacation. “Will, forever hopeful,” she thinks, “would have ended stranded by his father’s bedside, clutching for words, desperate for any indication of affection. Worse still, it would have cost them their longed for vacation; the chance to save their marriage.” She also tries to justify her act by indicating that his relationship with his father was less than perfect: “In other families the relationship would have been called estranged but her husband would just say that his dad didn’t telephone often. But then neither did Will.” She soon discovers that perhaps her husband hasn’t been as out of the loop as she thinks.

Laura Pendell contributes a cute poem titled “Envy” in which the narrator grows a tail and is uncertain what to do with it so asks a cat:

   The cat replied:
     You don’t do
       anything.
  It’s not something
to do something with.
It takes care of itself.

But the poetry isn’t all light. Carl Auerbach contributes a poem titled “Aftermath: A Photographic Exhibit of Female Survivors of the Genocide Against the Tutsis in Rwanda” that makes you churn inside:

I read the text below the photograph:
the son was born of rape,
the rape went on for days,
she blanked out after the first day,
she couldn’t love her son
when he was born, but now she does.

And the essays, too, are great reads, most notably Lynne Huffer’s “Meredith.” Huffer does an excellent job of weaving a poem by Susan Howe (that she memorized with her friend growing up) and a tragic story from the news with her own story and feelings of being somewhat fearful of the mountains she did not grow up in, that are not her “heart home.” And this essay certainly hits spot on with the editors’ preference to publish writing “that comes from the heart,” as is the rest of the issue.
[bluelakereview.weebly.com]