The Seattle Review – 2005

The Seattle Review’s lovely cover photograph belies the region’s mountainous nature by offering not a hint of near—or distant—mountains while providing the merest glimpse of Lake Washington; and from a locale often thought stubbornly regional, this issue’s surprising highlight is Kathleen Wiegner’s interview of M. Scott Momaday: “Some of my students sometimes say to me, ‘Wouldn’t it be wonderful if you wrote in Kiowa?’ My answer is, well, in the first place, you can’t. There’s no written language.

The Seattle Review’s lovely cover photograph belies the region’s mountainous nature by offering not a hint of near—or distant—mountains while providing the merest glimpse of Lake Washington; and from a locale often thought stubbornly regional, this issue’s surprising highlight is Kathleen Wiegner’s interview of M. Scott Momaday: “Some of my students sometimes say to me, ‘Wouldn’t it be wonderful if you wrote in Kiowa?’ My answer is, well, in the first place, you can’t. There’s no written language. And in the second place, no one would read you if you could.” In Gary Fincke’s “Rip His Head Off,” the importance of comic-book heroes looms large for a 13-year-old along with his panic as an orphaned 90-pound weakling confronted with fear of polio and neighborhood bullies. The domestic dramas of Brian Schwartz’s “Wine Country”—looking for something to believe in—and Errol Selkirk’s “Last One Up”—the end of days as a cure for empty-nest syndrome—are balanced by poetry by Jim Daniels, Seth Abramson, Barry Ballard, Kathy Epling, and Karen Glenn among others. I especially like “Mutations” by Mary Speaker: “I told L. it’s strange to know someone / so well; someone else said / art is what you don’t know you know, / like how because X can become Y / there are now eight hundred and fifty seven / magnetic bones in my body, so itchy / with kinetic sparks I pace indoors, / regard the radishes, chop them in two / and cover their vermillion hides / with salt, but this is not anxiety.”