Well-Rounded Reading
Let’s get right to the point; Five Points that is: Poetry, Fiction, Interview, Essay, Portfolio. Coming in at just under 150 pages, the literary journal by this name is ironically “well-rounded”. Published 3 times a year from Georgia State University, Five Points boasts a literary grab bag of big names, translated voices, and debut authors.
The issue opens with two wide-eyed poems from Tom Sleigh, one set in a refugee camp where the author battles a fever on the back of an ancient motorbike, the other a seaside village in Saudi Arabia where World Cup fever runs high. Poetry is the only vehicle that seems able to convey the author’s transatlantic vertigo, as celebration and tourism are juxtaposed by everyday poverty, violence, and pollution. “Like a forehead butting mine/expert but without malice/threatening to drag me down/until I slid out on the rocks.”
Continuing in an international vein, the issue includes five poems in translation from “Push Open the Window: Contemporary Poetry from China” forthcoming from Copper Canyon Press. The best of the bunch express familiar ancient themes of Eastern Culture, but in modern and surprising contexts. Wang Jiaxin’s “Drinking with His Son” perfectly captures the silent spaces of what isn’t said: “They clink their glasses together/This is the way they hug/It is also how they are reconciled.” Sen Zi’s “Burning Leaves” measures an individual’s anxiety beneath a national identity: “Tear out telephone cords, and measure with my lips/The temperature of the lies, I am my own/Vegetable market, bank, cinema, I am/I could also be nothing, fallen leaves or lovers.”
From the mountains of China to the Charles River, as a Boston resident I was happy to see fiction from two local writers. Jennifer Haigh is a New York Times Bestselling author living in the Boston area and Andra Hibbert is an MFA student at UMass Boston. Both Haigh’s story “Thrift” and Hibbert’s “Centers of Gravity” give us complex female characters to unravel. In "Thrift" Agnes is a 50-year old virgin stuck in the ghost of her parents’ house in a dying Pennsylvania coal-mining town until she falls for a young contractor with several offspring and criminal offenses spread out among other states. “It was pointless to wonder, now, how the years had escaped her. The hundreds of days – thousands- when she might have brought a man a glass of water, and changed the course of her life.” Though her sister warns and people stare, Agnes is as bold and solid as a bone that’s finally found home in a dog’s mouth. She’s irrevocably changed by love, but careful all the same: “Her parents’ thrift is an inherited disease, one she can’t quite shake.”
Elsa is the tough pixie darling of “Centers of Gravity”, the story of three nomadic climbing friends who find their momentum shattered when one has a bad fall that leaves him hospitalized and partially paralyzed. The situation forces the carefree twenty-somethings to crash into a reality that leaves them all reeling and confused about their commitments to one another. Promises that once felt as strong and sturdy as their belay lines begin to fray beneath hospital lights. Elsa confronts change with long winter runs up and down the Charles River, where she slips on an icy path: “For the first time in a long time there was nowhere I wanted to go. I felt like a huge red stop sign had slid down in front of my life, and all I could do was throw pathetic snowballs at it.” While her angst is fully realized, it never seems to find any resolve, and Elsa’s deep longing and misconnection is only more apparent at story’s end.
Essays include Jessamyn Hope’s honeymoon travel memoir “Tom’s Village”, a light story about trusting strangers and trusting those most close to you; and Gary Fincke’s “Shibboleth”, which captures the sweat and tension of the young English graduate student living in Cleveland on the edge of segregated neighborhoods at the time of Martin Luther King’s assassination. Poet Kim Addonizio, a long-standing figure in the San Francisco literary scene, is the featured interview.
Although I often find art included in literary journals to be more of a page break for the eyes or an accompanist to the real singers, Mark Steinmetz’s black and white photo portfolio “Summertime” feels like a real stand-alone solo. With slit eyes, ice cream-melted smiles, bored daydreams, and “do I haaave to?” grimaces, Steinmetz expertly captures the essence of the heat of growing up.
Five Points’ website states that they are currently buried under submissions and hope to resurface and begin reading again in September 2011. Five Points also sponsors the James Dickey Prize for Poetry ($1,000 and publication in Vol. 15 No. 3), with a reading period of September 1, 2011 through December 1, 2011.
