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Crab Orchard Review
Southern Illinois University Carbondale
Carbondale
IL 62901-4503
USA
ISSN 1083-5571
$6 [$9 RoW]
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This page last updated: 11th August 2004.
Crab Orchard Review Vol6. #2

This issue of prose and poetry on the theme of the city is dated Spring/Summer 2001 and was actually published Winter 2002/2003. The poetry is more successful than the prose which slipped into self-indulgence or had the city as a backdrop rather than integral to the story, with the exception of Carol Spindel's intriguing PLOT TURNOVER about the Cemetery Montparnasse. Susanna Roxman's TROY ends

	...You'll want to plummet gently
	but unerringly like amber in water
	down to the first Troy, a slow
	forgotten village where people
	kept goats and gathered green walnuts
	and nothing much ever happened,

	get back to before the beginning, transcend
	eras of flaming cities
	or stupid adulthood.
using assonance of vowel sounds to echo every city dweller's occasional wish for somewhere less hectic, less complicated, however briefly that wish lasts. Melissa Peters also captures the hassle of city-living in STEEL which starts
	I brave it everyday: concrete, glass-
	eyed towers, profit and loss. I've scraped
 
	my costume together with lipstick,
	stockings, a quick prayer that someday
 
	this will end...
and ends,
	...pigeons take flight, a loose scrawling 'S'
	written in the sky, their cape of wings
 
	flapping loud as my heart, as if
	in one fell swoop I'd tried, super-
 
	human, to stop an oncoming train.
Amar Gaurav Shah's MIDSUMMER IN BOMBAY ends
	...All this I embrace,
	understanding blind love, understanding why poets reach
	cities with words in their eyes and leave without
	conquering them, each city always swelling beyond the page
	whenever suppressed by the weight of an adjective.
CRAB ORCHARD REVIEW is worth reading. However, their publishing needs to get back on schedule: it's irritating reading about a request for a call for submissions on a specific theme with a deadline of October 15, 2001 and not getting the magazine until Winter 2002. Although the themes are published on the website, most potential submitters would read the magazine.

reviewer: Emma Lee.