Tampa Review – 31/32, 2007

Tampa Review does not look like a literary magazine. The size and shape of a children’s storybook, this hardcover journal elicits the same expectation of entertainment – some pictures, stories, perhaps a lesson or two. There are plenty of pictures, in all types of media. Charlee Brodsky photographs calves and feet, and Jim Daniels describes them in poetry in a series of four connected works. Daniels opens “Glow” with the memorable lines, “The scarred knees of the world / imagine their prayers might be / forgiven.”

Tampa Review does not look like a literary magazine. The size and shape of a children’s storybook, this hardcover journal elicits the same expectation of entertainment – some pictures, stories, perhaps a lesson or two. There are plenty of pictures, in all types of media. Charlee Brodsky photographs calves and feet, and Jim Daniels describes them in poetry in a series of four connected works. Daniels opens “Glow” with the memorable lines, “The scarred knees of the world / imagine their prayers might be / forgiven.” Marcia Aldrich’s essay “Spoon Altar” describes collectors of all kinds, winding the essay around the narrative of Joel, who shot himself just after sending the narrator and her family boxes containing his stamps. Joel divested himself of all of his belongings, and the list makes the heart plunge with each item, “He destroyed his letters, lesson plans, the poetry he had written as a young man, his unfinished essays, photographs, his address book.” Aldrich proves herself a master of the list, a collector herself, whether or not she acknowledges it. A child would be disappointed to know the poems don’t rhyme, but along with the non-fiction, they are Tampa Review’s strong suit. One of the strongest, Kevin A. Gonzalez’s “Cultural Silence; or, How to Survive the Last American Colony” contains potent imagery: “You are a tri-colored bead, Puerto Rico, / In an island necklace: ocean-blue annexation, Flamboyan red // status quo, & mountain-green independence.” Gonzalez works on several levels, something that not all of the poems strive for, but each contains its own precise observational eye.
[www.tampareview.ut.edu]