Editors’ Page

Abstract

1 EDITORS’ PAGE E ach fall, we feature the winning story of the Nelligan Prize for Short Fiction. The prize, now in its sixth year, was established to honor the memory of Liza Nelligan, a writer and editor who earned her ma from the English Department here at Colorado State University. This year, the prize was awarded to Angela Mitchell for her story “Animal Lovers,” selected by Robert Boswell, who says of the piece: “‘Animal Lovers’ surprises the reader at every turn. The lives of her quietly self-destructive characters seem to extend beyond the parameters of the story. They are controlled by forces beyond their ability to understand, but now and again they intuit their presence. The story permits the reader to think that it’s going to become predictable, but it turns away from the expected and takes the reader to a place that no one will anticipate. This is a much stranger story than it first appears and quite wonderful.” Though it was entirely unintentional, one might assume we had a theme in mind for this issue, as all three stories touch on the decision to have—or not have—children: In Angela Mitchell ’s “Animal Lovers,” a woman who doesn’t want children ends her marriage and pursues a new life; in Colette Sartor’s “Bandit ,” a couple dealing with miscarriage struggles with trying again; and in Yelizaveta Renfro’s “A Catalogue of Everything in the World,” a young woman grapples with both the disorder in her life and an unplanned pregnancy. And in her awp Intro Journals Award–winning essay, “The Missing Pictures,” Sarah Fang explores her grandmother’s internment in a World War ii Japanese-American camp while pregnant and single, and the resultant silences, gaps, and glossings-over. We also have nonfiction from Lee Gutkind—a short, compelling piece on the peculiar nature of revenge and forgiveness—as well as a fantastic assemblage of poetry selected by Matthew Cooperman. Welcome to the fall issue! —sg —— colorado review 2 B ank run, home run, clean house, sell house, house calls, health calls, cat calls, pig flu, white lie, yellow cake, black man, white house . . . The list of our acuities bewilders and suborns. At this writing, new missiles are rising over Iran, Roman Polanski is being held in a Swiss jail, and Americans think Wal-Mart best symbolizes our national character. Unsettling to be sure, but it sure ain’t boring. And neither is the poetry . What I see in this issue’s poems is a pattern of oppositions, balancing acts that, in their radical equivocations suggest a radical openness in tone and mode. Take Gillian Conoley’s hyperreal poem “[Sound of Freeways Directing the Cosmos Back to Its Start],” how “Death’s got some spiraled plenitude in the distance between clocks, / both a velocity and a stasis at large”; or Mark DuCharme’s “Imagine another fucked-up noise / At which schemes are somehow blown wide open” (“The Unfinished ”). Speed and expansion (our steady state). It’s something of what poet David Wojahn has observed lately as a necessity for capaciousness, an “immediacy that is never less than artful [to] the large spectrum of human emotion in all of its general messiness and contradiction.” Still, in all that range certain strategies emerge: a gallows wit that thumbs back at the very undertaking of poetry (Michael Burkard’s strange intimacies, H. L. Hix’s interrogative charms, Alan Michael Parker’s committee happiness); a locally observed nature (Merrill Gilfillan’s damselflies; Kimberly O’Connor’s awp Intro Journals Award– winning “Thrush:”); citational inhabitations (Martha Ronk, Barry Schwabsky, Philip Jenks & Simone Muench); simulations and adjacencies (John Gallaher and Jordan Stempleman); and long poems (Sally Keith’s Muybridge-Smithson excursus, the august flight of Chad Sweeney). We’re also pushing back with translations: two experimental Austrians, Hans Carl Artmann (b. 1921, d. 2002) and Barbara Hundegger (b. 1963), translated by the supremely resistant Rosmarie Waldrop (who also graces us with a prose poem). May you find something solid (something tasty) to shore against the ruins. —matthew cooperman ...