A Solid Literary Magazine

A psychedelic watercolor by artist Luis Coig called Fertile Field is apt cover art for this fertile spring issue of Postroad. Like the other full-color plates in the portfolio drawn from Coig’s 2007 work, “Tiny American Paintings” stapled into the center of the journal, Fertile Field evokes the artist’s early impressions of the “enchanted land” of Ecuador where he came of age–––with its “colorful traditions and fabulous biodiversity.”

There’s plenty of literary diversity in Postroad. Produced by the Boston College Department of English, Christopher Boucher, Managing Editor, Postroad includes, in addition to the standard fiction and poetry, folios for theatre, criticism, recommended readings, and selections by  guest editor Paul Mariani. This issue opens with Emma Cline’s haunting “Golden State,” conjuring the landscape and social milieu of a Sixties commune, “hen-house […] papered with pages from Rolling Stone,” and nubile girls growing “corn in the high heat of summer and [canned] peaches for the winter, drying sheets of lemon verbena under the noonday sun, jam bubbling hot and dark in cast-iron pots.”

Jesse Cataldo’s Sara in the charming coming-of-age story “Davey” is a character out of Salinger, a spoiled high school senior from the rural South, on her own, looking at colleges, staying at a hotel in New York City where she meets a bellhop named Davey with tassels on his shoulders.

      It was eleven by now and she called her mother, dialing on her back with the receiver on her chest.

     “Bored. Tired. The TV doesn’t work,” she lied.

     “I hope your father feels guilty for this. Leaving you alone in a city [. . . .]”

     “Mother there’s a boy here. He’s ugly and boring but he’s proposed and I think I’ll say yes.”

     “Sara, it’s too late for this.”

     “He asked for my virginity. Ten dollars, I said. Ten dollars and an ice cream sundae.”

     “I hope when you are my age you are blessed with a child as horrible as yourself.”

Others stories here employ the edgy, disengaged narrator standard in contemporary fiction: The eerily sanctimonious pastor in Sumanth Prabhaker’s “Alamo Nights,” who presides over a Hell and Damnation fire in a school gymnasium. Or Ronnie Milton, the deadbeat nephew who has his eye on the bank account of his rich, demented Aunt Helen in Dan Pope’s “An Inheritance.” Or Katherine Lien Chariott in her memories of a night of violence in a ruined man’s derelict rooms in Shanghai in “Self-Portrait, Number 1.”       

Postroad enriches the Jewish canon with both poems and stories in this issue. On her death bed, the narrator in Alanna Schubach’s “Raw Material” writes a letter to her granddaughter on the eve of her bat mitzvah, revealing family betrayals and redemptions, bringing to life the great-grandmother paralyzed by spousal infidelities overheard in a powder room; the dark, poet-husband’s suicide. In Robert Pack’s iambs (“Bubbie”), selected by guest editor Paul Mariani, a young poet’s voice finds an appreciative and moving audience in his bubbie’s Brooklyn apartment. 

Postroad’s poetry selections range from Joseph Bottum’s “Saro Love Song,” drawing on the satire of Zardast Osman, a journalist kidnapped and assassinated by thugs in Kirdistan to Whitney Dubie’s “A Vision of India,” to Stuart Krimko’s moving poem, “The Setting Evening, “As a sun sets, so does/ darkness. Towards morning/stars disappear and/then the dark begins to”.  A.M. Juster contributes two satiric verses the whimsical and amusing “My Billy Collins Moment” and  “A Plea to My Vegan Great-grandchildren”––

I know you hate the meat I ate,

But bacon always tasted great

And barbecue, when smoked just right

Was such a sensual delight

--though now I’m being more objective

and see it from the pig’s perspective.

.  .  . 

for all my sins I had the sense

to marry someone, I would guess,

who balanced by genetic mess

and made you brilliant, strong and kind—