Louisiana Literature – 2003

One of the most attractive journals I’ve seen in a great while, Louisiana Literature gets straight to the point – delivering prize-winning poetry in a range of styles, a nice helping of short fiction, and a few critical essays and reviews – all in a lovely, understated layout.

One of the most attractive journals I’ve seen in a great while, Louisiana Literature gets straight to the point – delivering prize-winning poetry in a range of styles, a nice helping of short fiction, and a few critical essays and reviews – all in a lovely, understated layout. Among the fiction here, I was most enthralled by Thomas Cain’s “Let This New Disaster Come,” a piece barely longer than five pages, which with great lyrical economy renders to stunning effect the mid-life quagmire of a cuckolded mechanic. All the blue-collar clichés come to bear in this tale, and yet they are handled with such emotional precision that the reader forgets she’s been audience to these events before. Also notable is “A Handful of Leaves” by Katie Bowler, in which a young boy comes of age by saving money to visit the local prostitute, not to buy her usual services, but to photograph her house for a social studies exhibit. The forty-five poems on offer are of a varied character, though most operate on a refreshing linear attack, opting to steer clear of the precarious poetic subtlety which, in the lit mag world, occasionally teeters into inscrutable modern-ness. Dale M. Kushner’s “Surrender” has some beautiful moments: “Late afternoon, into winter / doves stud the dusk, surrendering / what is left of their blue-notes / to the belled air.” [Louisiana Literature, SLU-10792, Southeastern Louisiana University, Hammond, LA, 70402. E-mail: [email protected]. Single issue $8. http://www.louisianaliterature.org] – MC