Ontario Review – Spring/Summer 2004

At the heart of this issue is fine work from photojournalist Jill Krementz’s “Literary Encounters” series, featuring pairings of literary icons, including my favorite: Reynolds Price and Eudora Welty, grinning at each other from opposite sides of what appears to be a bed. Thanks to Virgil Suarez for the unforgettable thought of circus nuns “offering spiritual grounding” to the “alligator man, bearded lady,” and “boy who is all head” as they fall through the world with the smallest of ease. In David Wagoner’s “The Escaped Gorilla,” we see how much more poignant is the predicament of wildness when, out of weariness and at too far a remove from what it was meant to be to ever bridge the distance, it becomes complicit in our need to vanquish it: At the heart of this issue is fine work from photojournalist Jill Krementz’s “Literary Encounters” series, featuring pairings of literary icons, including my favorite: Reynolds Price and Eudora Welty, grinning at each other from opposite sides of what appears to be a bed. Thanks to Virgil Suarez for the unforgettable thought of circus nuns “offering spiritual grounding” to the “alligator man, bearded lady,” and “boy who is all head” as they fall through the world with the smallest of ease. In David Wagoner’s “The Escaped Gorilla,” we see how much more poignant is the predicament of wildness when, out of weariness and at too far a remove from what it was meant to be to ever bridge the distance, it becomes complicit in our need to vanquish it: “They found him hiding behind the holly hedge / By the zoo office where he waited for someone / To take him by the hand and walk with him / Around two corners and along a pathway / Through the one door that wasn’t supposed to be open / And back to the oblong place with the hard sky.” Unlike the gorilla, the characters in Ontario Review stories–the fallen and dispossessed, ghosts living and dead–are yearners and fighters to the end, uncomfortable in the world and with what circumstance demands of them, but unaccountably true to their own yearning for something more, no matter how imperfectly imagined it might be. Ontario Review has a soft spot for bravery in the attempt. [Ontario Review] – AS