A Heartfelt Success
Gaylord Brewer's "Dead Metaphor #14: Infidelity" is one of the best poems I've read on the subject. The speaker is a soccer spouse ("Now it's load'm up, back to the Volvo, / back in the grid of eternal chauffeuring") who is, disbelievingly, involved in an affair ("'Lover!' Christ, / you're in Chekhov!"). The denials grow weaker as the poem ends with the two lovers in a hotel for the first time ("You could never, ever / have an affair, you explained that afternoon / in the hotel."), succumbing to temptation ("as the other pursued your unbuttoning"). The senses of disbelief, guilt, and eventual rapture are vividly captured.
"(Some of this happened, and all of it is true.)" In "Nearly Z: A Mock Memoir," Kathryn Gravdal's funny and touching account of a strict Lutheran childhood, Zsa Zsa Gabor is the child Hilda's one true goddess ("And any word that ended in ‘e-s-s' vibrated with femininity.") Her preacher father called Gabor an adulteress, which only added to the woman's secret glamour for the little girl. In her confused search for a role model, she also emulates Martin Luther's wife, Katharine, because she had once been a nun.
Her father also admonishes Hilda and her sisters that "People who drink alcohol are wicked. And those people have a name: Catholics." It's funny and yet it isn't. Gravdal walks this fine line throughout. Consider Hilda's mother, singing "Rock of Ages" while working her new Singer sewing machine, a gift from her husband: "'Let me hide myself in thee-ee-ee.' She wanted to hide in a rock? I would definitely encourage that."
It's clever of Gravdal to give herself an alter ego (as well as her sisters Snip, Snap, and Snur--there's also a baby, "but she didn't count yet"). It lends her memoir just the right tone of levity and seriousness that makes for a memorable read.
The artwork and photography in this issue was uniformly noteworthy. I'll point out Zebulon Huset's "Overpass Sunset," with its overpass silhouette black against a breathtaking sky, and Jodi Gosch's enigmatic photograph "Guess," which, if I really have to guess, resembles an albino octopus tentacle in Saran Wrap.
