Magazine Review by Katy Haas.

Issue 212 of Cimarron Review includes what feel like the comfort food of poetry. After a long week, it felt good to sit wrapped up in a blanket with this issue in my lap.

Victoria Hudson offers warmth to readers of “11th & Quaker.” Inside the apartment, the speaker and another person complete a crossword and watch well-known The Office. There’s comfort in the familiarity of both tasks, a quiet intimacy surrounding them.

Kim Kent’s “At the YMCA” shows us a different scene of intimacy as YMCA lifeguards practice CPR on one another “just to be sure,” all of them “generous with our drowned / and undrowned lips.” Kent kindles the heat of summer and the closeness of the two bodies with expertise.

David Ruekberg offers a “Cure for Thought” with a list of instructions that both calm and inspire the reader. He quietly guides us to observe and imagine until we reach the final, always useful step: “Listen.”

Make time to stop and listen to the words of the writers in this issue of Cimarron Review and find your own comfort poems.

Magazine Review by Katy Haas

The Spring 2020 issue of Cimarron Review is a slim one, but here is still plenty in its pages to keep a reader company, including a fine selection of poetry.

This selection includes Ethan Joella’s ruminations on the titular magazines that his “wife’s mother read in the hospital,” and a desire to destroy them to protect his wife in her grief. Joella creates a tender piece that focuses on his wife’s love for her mother, as well as his love for his wife.

Leslie McGrath asks one eight-word question in “Pink Inquiry,” a poem that makes impact with its simplicity. Christopher Brean Murray reflects on his childhood dogs “Duke & Pam,” and the way he has “never been able / to get into a poem the way” he felt about them. What results is a sweet poem about the three finding warmth and comfort in one another.

William Reichard in “Tinnitus (in Four Movements)” describes his relationship with the ringing in his ears, using the sound of cicadas as a way to lead this exploration. I read the fourth movement repeatedly, pulled in. “There was no escape from / the pulse of his own blood,” it reads, the stanza itself feeling as inescapable as the sound.

Take some time to visit the poetry in this issue of Cimarron Review, as well as the five pieces of prose also inside.