Green Mountains Review – Fall/Winter 2006

A good looking, glossy magazine, Green Mountains Review puts a strong emphasis on poetry. In fact, the best story in this issue is written by Therese Svoboda, who – not surprisingly – splits her time between prose (four novels) and poetry (four collections). The work “355,” about spies in the American Revolution era, contains the type of subject matter that most writers would spend half the story setting up so that they could splash their research all over the page. A good looking, glossy magazine, Green Mountains Review puts a strong emphasis on poetry. In fact, the best story in this issue is written by Therese Svoboda, who – not surprisingly – splits her time between prose (four novels) and poetry (four collections). The work “355,” about spies in the American Revolution era, contains the type of subject matter that most writers would spend half the story setting up so that they could splash their research all over the page. Svoboda pauses in unlikely places, such as the buttons a British loyalist asks for at the family store, “They should not have had these buttons except that her husband had traded with the gravedigger who removed them from the British corpses.” The story unfolds with the pacing and brevity of a poem. As expected in GMR, the poetry in this issue excels, from Katherine Sanchez Espano’s charming portrait of a father from the perspective of a child who loves toy trains, “In Miniature,” to Alicia Beal’s two outstanding offerings, “The Body’s Sermon” and “Desert Arrival,” each loaded with momentum and physicality. But Jennifer Perrine’s two humorous poems filled with unexpected but accurate metaphors stood out above the rest. In “The Amputation of My Brother’s Finger,” Perrine writes, “What remains besides is the knuckle: / its crayon pink hump gleaming amidst / his ochre skin.” As long as they keep printing such exceptional poetry, Green Mountains Review is well worth picking up, but one wonders when the fiction will reach the same heights. [greenmountainsreview.jsc.vsc.edu]