Lake Effect – Spring 2005

Lake Effect, an annual journal published by Pennsylvania State Erie, features an eclectic selection of poetry, fiction, and creative nonfiction. This issue includes the winners of the Sonnenberg Poetry Award, the Rebman Fiction Award, and the Farrell Nonfiction award, plus brief paragraphs stating the judge’s reasons for selecting the winning manuscripts. Both winners in the prose categories are short pieces, two to three pages, and lush and surreal in tone. R.M. Evans’s “Seahorse,” the nonfiction winner, is a particularly innovative look at the author’s recurring dreams and filled with unique imagery, “I feel my alveoli distend like spinose balloon fish.” Lake Effect, an annual journal published by Pennsylvania State Erie, features an eclectic selection of poetry, fiction, and creative nonfiction. This issue includes the winners of the Sonnenberg Poetry Award, the Rebman Fiction Award, and the Farrell Nonfiction award, plus brief paragraphs stating the judge’s reasons for selecting the winning manuscripts. Both winners in the prose categories are short pieces, two to three pages, and lush and surreal in tone. R.M. Evans’s “Seahorse,” the nonfiction winner, is a particularly innovative look at the author’s recurring dreams and filled with unique imagery, “I feel my alveoli distend like spinose balloon fish.” In addition to unknown names, Lake Effect has poems by notables like Denise Duhamel, David Kirby, and Georgia Review editor T.R. Hummer. I particularly enjoyed Duhamel’s homage to New Jersey, “Two-Thirds of the World’s Eggplant is Grown in New Jersey,” and Gerry LaFemina’s hypnotic “Poem Composed in the Alphabet of Bats”: “Sometimes we can hear the high school band marching / in the distance, a poltergeist of melody filtering through the dry wall / so indistinct we’re not sure if we’ve actually head it / until they’re done.” The contents of Lake Effect are diverse, although there’s a marked inclination towards the quirky and surreal. Definitely worth checking out. [Lake Effect: A Journal of the Literary Arts] – Laura van den Berg