Issue 57 | Spring 2008
Franz Wright considers language as sacrament; Jessica Murphy reviews Annie Dillard’s The Maytrees; and James Romaine explores the sculptures of Richard Serra. With poems by Lisa Russ Spaar, David Yezzi, Kelli Russell Agodon, and Moira Linehan; a conversation with Ron Hansen; new fiction by Pinckney Benedict and Paul Rawlins; and more.
Editorial Statement
Gregory Wolfe, Conservative Elegies
Fiction
Pinckney Benedict, The World, the Flesh, and the Devil
Paul Rawlins, The Garden
Web Exclusive: A Conversation with Pinckney Benedict
Poetry
David Yezzi, Savasana
The People
Kelli Russell Agodon, Conversation at Heaven's Gate
Moira Linehan, My Nineveh
Japanese Wall Hanging
Daniel Donaghy, The Medicine of Immortality
Start with the Trouble
My Mother in Connecticut
Hope
The Spirit of the Promise
Richard Jones, The Napkin
Adam Praises Eve
Normal
Lisa Russ Spaar, The Anxiety Offices
David Mason, The Fawn
Visual Arts
James Romaine, Gravity and Grace: The Art of Richard Serra
Richard Davey, Oliver Barratt: Poetry of the Void
Interview
Brennan O'Donnell, A Conversation with Ron Hansen
Essay
Franz Wright, Language as Sacrament in the New Testament
Paula Huston, The Kingdom of the Eternal Heaven
Book Review
Jessica Murphy, Annie Dillard's The Maytrees
Kelli Russell Agodon is the author of two books of poems, Small Knots (Cherry Grove) andGeography, winner of the Floating Bridge Chapbook prize. Her poems have recently appeared in the Atlantic Monthly, Prairie Schooner, Meridian, North American Review, and Five a.m.Her website is www.agodon.com. This poem is dedicated to her father, Gale A. Russell, who died in 1992.
Pinckney Benedict has published two collections of short fiction and a novel. His stories have appeared in magazines including Esquire, Zoetrope: All-Story, StoryQuarterly, andOntario Review and been anthologized in the O. Henry Award series, New Stories from the South, the Pushcart Prize series, and the Oxford Book of American Short Stories. He serves as a professor in the English Department at Southern Illinois University in Carbondale, Illinois.
Richard Davey is a visiting fellow at the School of Art and Design at Nottingham Trent University and a member of the visual arts research group there. His doctoral thesis examined sensibilities of faith in contemporary visual art, and he is now exploring themes around color and light. He has been the principal contemporary art critic for the Church Times for the last fourteen years and has written a number of artists’ catalogues and curated numerous exhibitions in galleries and churches.
Daniel Donaghy’s first collection of poems, Streetfighting (BkMk), was named a finalist for the 2006 Paterson Poetry Prize. His poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Prairie Schooner, New Letters, The Southern Review, Poet Lore, Cimarron Review, and the Texas Review. The recipient of fellowships from the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Constance Saltonstall Foundation for the Arts, he is an assistant professor of English at Eastern Connecticut State University.
Paula Huston’s most recent book is By Way of Grace: Moving from Faithfulness to Holiness(Loyola). She is also the author of The Holy Way: Practices for a Simple Life (Loyola) andDaughters of Song (Random House). A NEA fellow, she has published short stories and essays in a variety of literary journals and magazines, most recently The Christian Century. She is an oblate of a contemplative Catholic order and is currently at work on a book about forgiveness for Paraclete Press.
Richard Jones is the author of six books of poems, most recently Apropos of Nothing(Copper Canyon). His poems appear in Billy Collins’s anthology Poetry 180 (Random House) and Garrison Keillor’s Good Poems (Viking). The Blessing (Copper Canyon) won the Society of Midland Authors Award. Editor of Poetry East, he is professor of English at DePaul University in Chicago.
Moira Linehan lives in Winchester, Massachusetts. Her manuscript If No Moon (Southern Illinois) was selected as the 2006 winner in the Crab Orchard Series in Poetry open competition.
David Mason’s books include The Buried Houses, The Country I Remember, and Arrivals (all from Story Line), as well as a verse novel, Ludlow (Red Hen). He co-edited Rebel Angels: Twenty-five Poets of the New Formalism (Story Line) and Twentieth-Century American Poetics: Poets on the Art of Poetry (McGraw-Hill). His work has appeared in Harpers, The New Republic, and The Nation.
Jessica Murphy is the fiction editor of Memorious: A Journal of New Verse and Fiction and a freelance writer based in Seattle. Her writing has appeared in Poets & Writers Magazine, The Atlantic Online, The Tablet, and Portland. She was the 2006-2007 Milton Center Postgraduate Fellow at Image and has a short story forthcoming in the 2008 Atlantic Monthly fiction issue.
Brennan O’Donnell is professor of English and dean of Fordham College at Rose Hill, Fordham University. He is the author of The Passion of Meter: A Study of Wordsworth’s Metrical Art (Kent State) and has published scholarly essays on a range of writers from Shakespeare to William Kennedy. He served for six years as editor of the national magazineConversations on Jesuit Higher Education.
Paul Rawlins’s first short story collection, No Lie like Love (Georgia), received the Flannery O’Connor Award for short fiction from the University of Georgia Press. His short stories have appeared in numerous publications, including Glimmer Train, Prism International, Paris Transcontinental, and America West’s in-flight magazine. Rawlins lives in Salt Lake City.
James Romaine is co-founder of the New York Center for Arts and Media Studies, a program of Bethel University (nycams.Bethel.edu). He has a PhD in art history from the graduate center of the City University of New York, where he wrote his dissertation on Tim Rollins and KOS. He lectures widely and has written numerous articles on faith and the visual arts.
Lisa Russ Spaar is the author of the poetry collections Blue Venus (Persea); Glass Town(Red Hen), for which she received a Rona Jaffe Award for Emerging Women Writers; and the forthcoming Satin Cash (Persea). Her work has appeared in Poetry, Paris Review, Virginia Quarterly Review, Ploughshares, Kenyon Review, Yale Review, and elsewhere. She directs the Area Program in Poetry Writing at the University of Virginia, where she is an associate professor of English.
Franz Wright received the Pulitzer Prize for poetry in 2004 for Walking to Martha’s Vineyard;his most recent books of poetry are God’s Silence and Earlier Poems (both from Knopf). A new collection, Wheeling Motel, is forthcoming in 2009. He has received grants and fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the Whiting Foundation, and the NEA. He occasionally teaches, and works as a volunteer facilitator at the Center for Grieving Children in Arlington, Massachusetts.
David Yezzi’s second book of poems, Azores, will be published later this spring by Swallow/Ohio University Press. His verse drama, On the Rocks, was recently given a staged reading by Verse Theater Manhattan at the Bowery Poetry Club.
Read our interview with Pinckney Benedict, only available online!