The Endicott Review Vol.25, #1, Spring, 2008.

The Endicott Review Vol.25, #1, Spring, 2008.
Editorial Board Dan Sklar, Noga Ambar, Janet Calcaterra, etc.
Faculty Editor: Ruth Henderson, 88 pp.
Endicot College, Beverly, Massachusetts 01915



Not one of those suffer-while-you-read quarterlies, The Endicott Review is mainly nicely impacting snippets of REALITY: “ The summer of ‘72 / My father’s last garden/These flowers burgeoned/In bright oranges and yellows.../I could see him creating his own genetic planning/Masterminding new vegative forms/And the vines and shoots would have/Swallowed up the house in the middle/Surrounded by ideas and green/Much like I imagine his Eden is/That is returned to him now....” (Betsy Retallack,“Nasturtiums,” p.37). And Betsy Retallack is typical of the contributors, a music teacher in Beverly, Mass by day, a poet by night.

No mind-boggling cryptograms here. Get ready for meditations on real REALITY: “The first autumn chill is here,/ Though a hint of summer still lingers in the air.../ Long shadows in early afternoon,/Remind me of how fast the summer went by.,// It’s a good bye day to summer,/And a gentle greeting to autumn’s first cool couch.” (Jim Mulholland, “A Good Bye Day to Summer,” p. 43).
The prose is very similar too, almost impossible to distinguish between personal tale-telling essay and fiction:
All this happened, more or less. The world has changed
quite a bit since the events of this story, and so to you
this may seem untrue, but this is my story, and this is
how I’m telling it.
One day, one single day, changed history forever.....

(“Isolation” by Joseph Stucker,pp. 15-16)

Every piece in this issue drags you on to read more....more....more....

A refreshing change from enigmatic windowless work elsewhere.
And just in case you start to get bored with words, there are a number of splendid color photos by Johnny Bonacci, Andrea Marchosky, Carolina Bara, etc.
One little critique. There should be a more specific street address and subscription cost somewhere in the magazine. For individual subscribers and libraries that want to keep abreast of the vivacity of The Now !

Hugh Fox/ Ibbetson Update/April 2008

* Hugh Fox is a founding member of the Pushcart Prize. He is a regular reviewer for the Small Press Review.