Flash Fiction, Poetry and More: A Journey Around the World

If I had to pick three words to describe the Spring/Summer issue of Hayden’s Ferry Review, they would be: “surreal,” “international,” and “short.”

Of course, no one is restricting me to three words. But the issue doesn’t label itself as anything in particular: it doesn’t call itself “the international issue” or “the short forms issue,” yet there are sections of translated poetry and prose and a section devoted to short forms.

In lieu of an introduction, the issue begins and ends with two short poetic responses to the cover art, which is a photo by Norweigan artist Christian Houge: "Cairn, Spitsbergen 2003".

The photo is of a satellite dish on the isolated Artic island of Svalbard, a place favored by scientists because of its clean atmosphere. Although it’s a photo of a real place, the black and white image of the technical instrument alone on a misty field of rocks is an odd juxtaposition, an almost surreal image. The introductory prose poem by Elizabeth Graver takes the satellite dish’s act of measuring with numbers and imagines the numbers with odd, disturbing imagery: “Number 1, wide-bellied, cracked and creviced, with slits and hollows, breasts and teeth….Behind her, Number 2 and Number 3 squat, great metal diaphragms, tipped uteruses.”

The closing prose poem by Jeremy Allan Hawkins is a more literal response to the photo, but also describes the image in a way that emphasizes its strangeness: “Gray wash wafts in, out, over, forming nothing too definite, even the faces of rocks.”

Many of the poems and prose pieces in this issue of Hayden’s Ferry Review begin with an arresting, surreal image, around which the rest of the piece is built. Luke Geddes’ story “Surfer Girl” begins with a dark, striking version of the titular image: “A tentative, foam-lipped wave deposits the surfer girl gingerly on the shore, crimson petals blossoming from the gashes on her forehead and abdomen, skin pale and cold against the glittering white sand, the halo of a sand castle’s moat above her seaweed-tangled hair.”

Many of these images are dark, but some pieces are shot through with an off-beat sense of humor. “Whimper,” a poem by Hannah Sanghee Park, sets the poem up as a Mad-Libs-style fill-in-the-blank that amusingly riffs on the imagery of many contemporary poems: “The setup upset (mythological deity), much in the way (sacrilege of choice) upset you, with (the fire of : ?) and maybe it was just the (excuse for dealing with the intangible) …” Amusingly, “Becky Home-Ecky and Her Fourteen Boyfriends” by S.E. Smith imagines the titular Becky Home-Ecky and her various surreal domestic duties: “Becky Home-ecky poaches a fish in her own tears./You will never believe how hot her oven runs./Boyfriend One comes over for a tiny taste and says,/ ‘Thanks, babe.’ Boyfriend Two is on the couch…”

There’s also the impressive International section, which has six translated pieces. Each piece has an introduction by the translator, which helps provide context, and the issue has made the smart decision to print the piece in the original language on the opposing page. Seeing the pieces in their original languages (which range from Russian to Hebrew to Spanish to Uyghur) gives a sense of the enormity of the act of translation and a little insight into the experience of reading the piece in the original language.

The “short forms” sections, as you might expect, has many pieces that toe the line between flash fiction, prose poetry, and brief essay. Many of them are also based around amusing, surreal images: Michael Brooks Cryer’s piece “Modern Medicine” begins: “To be of help to its contemporaries, an artificial heart learned to sing during the last desperate moments before a transplant operation,” an image that is both odd and oddly sweet.

Many of the short pieces reflect the cover art’s preoccupation with technology, with measuring. “Session 5” by Kevin McIlovy imagines a patient whose feelings are being measured via sensors: “The client often had a feeling at 22-36 Hz resembling an in inhibited thought in the 4-7 Hz range. In order to reward the 15-18 Hz range, regions 8R of the parietal and region 3R of the temporal should, optimally, produce neither thought nor feeling.” The language of numbers and measuring is integrated throughout the issue.

As a cap to the international and short forms sections, there’s a translation of several prose poems by Pierre Peuchmaurd and a short essay from the translator, E.C. Belli, on “The Prose Poem in France.”

There are other goodies to be found in the essay – lots of artwork and an interview with Eula Biss, for starters. But I come back to my three original words: international, surreal, and short. The issues’ representation of international writers and focus on short forms gives this Hayden’s Ferry Review its distinctive flavor: often odd, but always interesting.