Volume 43, Issue 3
FRONT COVER: Elizabeth Meyersohn
IT IS ENOUGH and CLOSER STILL, 2002
OIL ON LINEN
(both) 48 X 56 INCHES
THERE IS CONSIDERABLE distance between CM. Mayo’s kind of whale-watching and Ishmael and Ahab’s, especially if Fred Bernard is right in suggesting that Melville’s characters are not who we think they are. And then, as Jeremy Greenfield’s introduction promises, “There are three stories in Longitude at Sea!” The ocean is one enormous and perpetual displacement, but there are other kinds, too. Xiao Xiaoda, deported prisoner of the Cultural Revolution, finds an instant of food, wine and love at a dislocated Spring Festival. Disembodied opera fills Paula Speck’s heating ducts. And our own year of profound displacement is marked in Ann Lauterbach’s remembrance of September 11, 2001.
—David Lenson, for the Editors
Table of Contents
Lay Thine Hand Upon Him, Fiction by C.M. Mayo
The Flower Carriers, Poetry by Jan Conn
The Question of Race in Moby-Dick, Non-Fiction by Fred V. Bernard
Longitude at Sea: a novel in verse, Fiction by Jeremy Greenfield
Only Opera, Non-Fiction by Paula Speck
The Two Franzes, Fiction by Melvin Jules Bukiet
For My Father and For My Father on Poetry, Poetry by Jennifer Tseng
Devil’s Trill, Non-Fiction by Xiaoda Xiao
Helmets, Poetry by Kevin Bowen It’s Friday, Poetry by Tom Wayman
It Loses Its Grandeur, Fiction by Molly Fitzsimons
What Is a Day, Non-Fiction by Ann Lauterbach
Contributors
Fred V. Bernard‘s recent publications include “Symmetry in Romeo and Juliet: A Continuation” (Shakespeare Newsletter) and “He Takes Her by the Palm: Heresy and Inquisition in Othello” (Renaissance Association of West Virginia). He is a Professor Emeritus in English at Aquinas college, where he taught for 31 years.
Kevin Bowen is the director of the William Joiner Center for the Study of War and Social Consequences at UMass, Boston. His most recent collections are Forms of Prayer at the Hotel Edison and Six Vietnamese Poets, which he edited and translated with Nguyen Ba Chung (both from Curbstone Press).
Melvin Jules Bukiet is the author of six books of fiction, most recently Strange Fire, and the editor of two anthologies, most recently Nothing Makes You Free. He teaches at Sarah Lawrence College and lives in New York City.
Jan Conn is an Associate Professor in Biology at the University ofVermont. Her most recent publication is Beauties on Mad River (Vehicule Press). She is currently at work on a poetry manuscript about the brilliant Amazonian botanical illustrator, naturalist and explorer, Margaret Mee.
Molly Fitzsimons received her MFA from Hunter College, where her collection of stories won the Margaret Fahy Raynor MFA Thesis Award. Her work has appeared in Passages North.
Jeremy Greenfield is a recent graduate of Hampshire College from New Jersey.
Ann Lauterbach is Ruth and David Schwab Professor of Languages and Literature at Bard College, where she is also director of Writing in the Milton Avery Graduate School of the Arts. Her books include: If In Time: Selected Poems 1975- 2000 (2001); On A Stair, And For Example; and Clamor. She received a MacArthur Fellowship in 1993.
C.M. Mayo‘s forthcoming book is Miraculous Air: Journey of a Thousand Miles through Baja, California, the Other Mexico. Mayo’s fiction has appeared or is forth coming in Chelsea, The Paris Review, turnrow, and Witness. Mayo is the founding editor of Tameme, the bilingual journal of new writing from North America.
Elizabeth Meyersohn is a landscape painter living and working in Northampton. A graduate of Smith College and Yale University School of Art, she has had numerous exhibitions both nationally and locally. Currently Elizabeth teaches painting at Assumption College in Worecester.
Paula K. Speck has taught Spanish and traveled in Latin America and Europe. She is a lawyer from Washington, D.C. and is working on a book about how violence feels ‘from both sides of the gun.’
Jennifer Tseng‘s work has appeared in Ploughshares, Green Mountain Review, Hawai’i Review and elsewhere. She has twice been a fellow at the Fine Arts Work Center in Provineetown. Currently an MFA candidate at the University of Houston, she is at work on a novel.
Tom Wayman‘s most recent collection of poems is I’ll Be Right Back (Ontario Review Press). He is the editor of an anthology of contemporary Canadian love poems, The Dominion of Love (Harbour) and currently teaches at the University of Calgary. Xiao Xiaoda moved to Amherst, Massachusetts, from Shanghai, China, in 1989. His work has appeared in The Atlantic Monthly, Antaeus, DoubleTake, and Confrontation.