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Ruminate – Fall 2008

Issue 9

Fall 2008

Quarterly

Rachel King

Ruminate’s layout is beautiful: almost trade magazine size but sturdier, writing centered on white or grey or black pages, Evan Mann’s creation sketches littered between poems and an essay and a short story. The journal’s writing is equally beautiful, pieces which demonstrate faith inside literature as well as faith in literature, a faith that literature can explain and inspire.

Ruminate’s layout is beautiful: almost trade magazine size but sturdier, writing centered on white or grey or black pages, Evan Mann’s creation sketches littered between poems and an essay and a short story. The journal’s writing is equally beautiful, pieces which demonstrate faith inside literature as well as faith in literature, a faith that literature can explain and inspire.

Julie L. Moore’s poem “Confession” won the Janet B. McCabe poetry prize. Her poem gives writers hope that there is always a new way to say an old story, for she writes about Jesus’s healing of the bleeding woman from the woman’s perspective: “She knew the rules: Keep your hands / to yourself. Whatever you touch you foul. / But she reached for him anyway. / Fastened her un- / Clean fingers, tipped / With outrageous nerve, / Onto the lip of his cloak.”

Many pieces use rumination on nature as a catalyst for poetry: Lauren Dobay’s “The Birds are Falling” begins, “We secretly hope the birds will never learn of God”; William R. Stoddart’s “River Cabin” treats a house as a human attune to nature: “She watches the timeline of the river passing by, / and milestone splash before her mirrored eyes / as we pull through sodden leaves”; and in Shanna Powlus Wheeler’s “The Widow’s Lament in Autumn,” elder bugs are a metaphor for grief.

One of the final pieces, Jo Scott Coe’s “Calling,” records childhood moments which influenced her decision to be an artist and a teacher: “As becomes habit, you drag fingertips across bookspines filling grey shelves along one living room wall, touch and wonder where these texts come from, how they are written and manufactured and make it to the grainy shelves.” Lovers of literature or music will relate to at least a couple of Coe’s memories, as lovers of literature will find pieces in Ruminate which will resonate with them.
[www.ruminatemagazine.org/]

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