By Vince Corvaia

The first thing you notice about the twenty-third issue of Meridian is the announcement on the cover:  “Lost Classic: Katharine Anne Porter.”  Could it be—a newly discovered short story by one of the masters?  Well, no.  It’s a one-page typed reply by Porter to a book designer in 1950 (part of which appears in an angled strip on the cover, but it’s easy to overlook).  The introduction, by one of Meridian’s officially listed Readers (and soon-to-be co-fiction editor), is four pages long, complete with Works Cited.  But don’t judge this book by its cover.  Explore for yourself.

Lynne Potts’ “Barely Ask” is an interrogative poem, asking five questions with four question marks.  The first question sets up the tone and the subject in one line:  “When you get old do your lips shrink, do you know?”  The speaker is preoccupied with aging, and in particular on its effect on one’s lips.  But this is primarily a poem about language, the various ways the same thought can be approached, the way “you” draws the reader in and makes her or him consider the answers, the rhythmic repetition of the words “lips” and “old.”  There’s an urgency in these queries, as if time is a factor, as if the speaker must learn the answers before “you are too old to talk.”

Laura van den Berg’s short story, “Reptiles,” is a short meditation on loss, in this instance the liquidation of an exotic pet shop business.  A woman and her fiancé, both unnamed, open a store in a shopping mall with reptiles sent from the fiancé’s cousin.  “We were ill-equipped,” the woman tells us.  “We were underprepared.”   She gives us several reasons for this, the most practical being the presence of two national-chain pet stores within ten miles of the mall.  The store was her fiancé’s idea.  When it looks like it’s going to fail, he calls prayer hot lines.  He’s so bereft that she has to close the store herself.  But what matters here is really the tone of the story, how the inevitability of loss washes over these two characters, and the grieving that accompanies the aftermath (he cuts his long hair, she buries a tortoise that didn’t make it, then wipes off the dirt to see if she can discern the future in its shell markings, to no avail).  What happens in “Reptiles” isn’t as memorable as what is felt, because that feeling is finally what lingers.

Tao Lin is a poet and fiction writer.  Meridian interviews him here, one of two interviews in the magazine.  It’s a quirky, almost arbitrary interview (like the quirky, almost arbitrary style of his poems, of which the issue features not one or two but nine), conducted via email.  Email is making genuine discourse a thing of the past, reducing letters of old to MTV snippets of conversation.  I’m sure the editors decided that email would be the proper forum for a poet who writes in such an abbreviated, conversational fashion, but in the end we really don’t learn that much about him.  (We learn that he saw the film Wendy and Lucy, but who cares?) 

But this is a review of one of Lin’s poems, not the interview.  The chosen poem is called “microsoft should open casinos in las vegas and atlantic city.”  That’s the title, the thesis, and almost the entire poem.  The speaker tells four people that Microsoft should open a casino.  He tells one in Atlantic City.  He tells two in Las Vegas.  Then he tells a fourth person: “i was in manhattan, i think, i don’t remember what the person said.”  The upshot is that “microsoft would dominate everyone very badly.”  Lin’s poetry is for young people who aspire to become writers.  It gives them hope.

Young people could also become excited reading Wm. Meyer’s partial sequence of five poems called “Man on a Bicycle.”  No poem is longer than five lines (most of them are four).  Each line is a complete sentence.  Here is the first poem in the sequence in its entirety:  “He rides. / He stops. / He thumbs his cash. / He rides.”  The contributors’ notes tell us that Meyer’s work “has appeared widely in the U.S. and abroad.”  I can only conclude that five poems aren’t enough to give us a cumulative feel for what he is trying to do or say.

Alyssa Knickerbocker’s short story, “When No One Rakes,” is a delight.  The characters feel three-dimensional; you want their lives to continue far beyond the end of the story, as in a novel.  Sadie and Gus have just moved to an island and have invited friends for a Thanksgiving sleepover.  The friends are Marianne and Sam, two lovers both of whom are women; Elliot, once Sadie’s platonic roommate and now recently separated from his longtime girlfriend; and Garrett, a profane bicyclist and also a stickler for playing Trivial Pursuit properly.  Their intertwined relationships and easy conversations might remind you of The Big Chill or some of Ann Beattie’s early stories.  Reading this story is like reconnecting with old friends.  As Elliot says, “We barely ever see each other, or talk that much, but it doesn’t even matter.  When we get together, it’s like old times.” 

Andrew Terhune’s “The Lord God is a Bird” is an event poem, the event being the sighting of a unique bird (“Someone says, / Elvis in feathers”) by a group of bird watchers (or birders, as they’re called nowadays).  They might be ornithologists (“Ornithologists keep / their fingers tied / with string, / to remember this”), or they might simply be bird lovers.  We can’t tell.  But the thing is the chance discovery, the elation of wonder as humans meet nature.

This issue of Meridian contains four short stories, 22 poems, two interviews, five books reviews, and one letter by a famous author.