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River Teeth – Fall 2006

Volume 8 Number 1

Fall 2006

Jennifer Sinor

The advantage of a literary journal devoted entirely to one genre is the ability to explore and expand the possibilities of the form. River Teeth does just that. While most literary journals might publish two or even three nonfiction essays, River Teeth can include more than a dozen in each issue, a number that allows the reader to get a strong sense of just how many ways there are to approach the “truth.”

The advantage of a literary journal devoted entirely to one genre is the ability to explore and expand the possibilities of the form. River Teeth does just that. While most literary journals might publish two or even three nonfiction essays, River Teeth can include more than a dozen in each issue, a number that allows the reader to get a strong sense of just how many ways there are to approach the “truth.” One of the highlights of the fall issue is the opening essay by Sydney Lea that reads more like poetry than prose in some ways. Structured around the list of errands taped to the dashboard of his car, “Change of Equations” is a meditation on the ordinary world that passes before us every day and that offers moments of suffering and joy. So many personal essays explore the grief that surrounds us, but Lea’s does the harder work of describing those transcendent moments where we come to see what really matters. The interview with Judith Kitchen and Dinty Moore on the short nonfiction form is also very illuminating. The two writers describe what they see happening within one of the more experimental and exciting areas of nonfiction. The reader is left wondering what can’t be done in 750 words. Finally, Floyd Skloot’s essay about his mother’s struggle with dementia is as beautiful as it is moving. A shadow of her former self, she talks to her son in bits and fragments of Depression-era songs, a code he desperately struggles to crack even though he knows it is chaos. Of his mother’s ever-present anger he writes that she hoarded her “youthful possibilities till they nestled like tinder in her emotional core.”
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