ISSUES | spring 2000

23.1 (Spring 2000): "Passion’s Fool"
Featuring the winners of the 1999 Jeffrey E. Smith Editors’ Prize and work by Jennifer Anderson, Marshall Boswell, Jamie Callan, Donald Hays, Jennifer Michael Hecht, Jack Heflin, Davis McCombs, Susan Neville, Elizabeth Templeman, and an interview with Li-Young Lee.
CONTENT FROM THIS ISSUE

Fiction
Oct 22 2011
In Between Things
In between things, Parker slept with Rachel. He kept telling himself he wouldn’t do it, even insisted, sometimes out loud, that the mere thought of doing it was completely out of the question.

Nonfiction
Mar 01 2000
A Bride for my Son
The sight of the girl’s short neck made me look away. A wide, stocky neck shaped like an overturned flower pot, with no space for a string of pearls. I had always been proud of the slender stems on which the women in our family carried their heads.

Poetry
Mar 01 2000
Poetry Feature: Jack Heflin
The Cat Scan
The Bad Caddie
Pan-Olympic Mid Life
Friday Night Fights
Elegy

Nonfiction
Mar 01 2000
Twenty-Five Years with "War and Peace"
I took a course in Modern American literature in 1975, taught by a man named Walter Slatoff. I dragged along four friends who had little interest in literature but indulged me for some reason that I forget. Among them was the young man who would become my husband, who remembers how Slatoff was about to read an exercept from my paper in the last moments of his final lecture but ran out of time.

Poetry
Mar 01 2000
Poetry Feature: Davis McCombs
Featuring the Poems: Mooncalves Freemartin [This poem was featured as Poem of the Week, January 15, 2008] Dismantling the Cave Gate Stephen Bishop’s Grave Cave Mummies Broken Country

Fiction
Mar 01 2000
Talk About Sex: An Orientation
All I’m going to do is talk. That’s right–you’re going to pay me to sit here and talk to you.

Fiction
Mar 01 2000
Why He Did It
Two hours after he exposed himself to her, the girl made a scene at supper. It was just what Wilder had hoped she’d do.

Poetry
Mar 01 2000
Poetry Feature: Jennifer Michael Hecht
How To Go Home
A Victorian Construction
Totem and Taboo
Trostky’s Hand
Swamp Thing

Fiction
Mar 01 2000
The Restaurant with the Glass Lamps
Excerpt:
They were suspended over the Ohio River. It was nighttime, and she couldn’t see the water. There was a blinking cell-phone tower on the opposite shore, and her lover was driving toward it.

Fiction
Mar 01 2000
Coney Island in Winter
Winner of the 1999 Editors’ Prize for Fiction THE FEELING OF MY FAT on me—and wanting to get rid of it. Seeking to sell it, get something for my fat.… read more

Fiction
Mar 01 2000
Things That Make Your Heart Beat Faster
If I was a painter this is how I would paint the Napa Valley: not like those gallery scenes of mustard in bloom or harvest-ripe fruit, but this ghostly silver secret landscape, the vines dormant and white with frost, the moon full, jackrabits scattering across the roadway before me like mercury beads.

Interviews
Mar 01 2000
An Interview with Li-Young Lee
I feel that the work of poetry is like making potato latkes. Every poem is like a potato latke, that’s all it is. On the other hand, it’s the most important thing a person can do. I suppose it’s because I believe poetry’s work is to uncover a genuine or authentic human identity, an identity even prior to childhood. It’s like the Zen question: What was your face before you were born? I think poetry tries to answer that, to come to terms with an identity that’s ancient and eternally fresh because it is so ancient.

Poetry
Mar 01 2000
Flashlight Stories
Winner of the 1999 Editor’s Prize in Poetry Flashlight Stories I. The women in this family play pinochle, smoke, toss back salted nuts with the dregs of their… read more