Crazyhorse – Spring 2010
Number 77
Spring 2010
Biannual
Sima Rabinowitz
One of the things I have always appreciated most about Crazyhorse is Crazyhorse’s appreciation of the capacity of language’s glorious limitations, the way in which what we cannot say, must say, do not say, and end up saying anyway comes to life in the hands of a gifted writer. Here is Jennifer Militello reassuring me that this issue won’t let me down in her poem, “A Dictionary at the Turn of the Millennium”:
One of the things I have always appreciated most about Crazyhorse is Crazyhorse’s appreciation of the capacity of language’s glorious limitations, the way in which what we cannot say, must say, do not say, and end up saying anyway comes to life in the hands of a gifted writer. Here is Jennifer Militello reassuring me that this issue won’t let me down in her poem, “A Dictionary at the Turn of the Millennium”:
Hello to devouring, hello to digest,
to the end of lostness and the chill of less.
Hello to living like sardines.
To solace. To the offspring of hello
Hello to desperation. Hello to welcome in.
Hello to generations that etcetera as we watch.
Hello to experiment with us.
Hello to angels at the mouth-ache
of more. Hello to the surgical morning.
Hello to the delicious read let of lakes,
to being gone like a long underwater.
Hello, it is an ordinary world, hello
limited time and autumn’s pent-up monsters.
Hello, routine. Paralysis. Paradise.
Adrenaline catastrophe. Hello.
Work of equal originality and success includes “Law of Resemblances,” a poem by Leonard Kress; Melissa Kwasny’s prose poem “Clairvoyance (Your Word),” and another by Dara Wier, “Lovers at the Crossroads”; Mark Irwin’s poem “About”; the expert translation from the French by Marilyn Hacker of poems by Emmanuel Moses; three poems by Emily Rosko; “I Hope to God You Smoke,” a story by K.F. Enggass; “The 7 Stages of a Parental Visit,” a story by Claire Guyton, and Akshay Ahuja’s story “The Gates,” among other fine contributions to the issue. Fiction is narrated by voices that are credible, appealing, idiosyncratic, but never false or unduly odd.
Rosko’s poem “To Pasture” seems an extension of Militello’s in some ways and sums up the journal’s appeal for me:
Everywhere is a nowhere
and here we are
in the middle of it.
