The Florida Review – Spring 2007

At 170 pages, The Florida Review provides a little something for everyone: poetry, fiction, nonfiction, comics, and book reviews. Some stand-out pieces include poems by Denise Duhamel (“Spoon” and “A Flower of Fish”), and an interview with poet Peter Meinke, who talks about his love for Donne’s “mixture of wit, formalism, and passion.”

At 170 pages, The Florida Review provides a little something for everyone: poetry, fiction, nonfiction, comics, and book reviews. Some stand-out pieces include poems by Denise Duhamel (“Spoon” and “A Flower of Fish”), and an interview with poet Peter Meinke, who talks about his love for Donne’s “mixture of wit, formalism, and passion.” Fiction-wise, Mary Elizabeth Pope’s “Divining Venus” is a beautifully angst adolescent tale. Peter Selgin’s “Eagle Electric,” may be the best personal essay I’ve ever read. It tells of the author’s profound friendship with his college roommate – a Vietnam vet and “artistic genius” beginning to lose his sanity – in 1970’s New York. Selgin’s prose, which captures every sound, smell, and image perceived by two young men who strive to “keep their senses sharp,” reads like poetry. It’s hard to choose a passage to quote, but here’s one that gives nothing of the story away: “There were the subways digging tunnels through my sleep, and garbage trucks beeping and growling, and the caterwauls of coital cats, and stray dogs barking endless streams of monomaniacal Morse code . . . and the hissing of that damned silver [heating] pipe . . . like a rocket ship trying to blast off. And, rumbling beneath all of those other sounds, there was the steady drum roll of Dwain’s Promethean snores.” The ending seems to take Selgin himself by surprise. It would be worth picking up this issue for his essay alone.
[http://www.floridareview.cah.ucf.edu/]