This is the first issue of this literary review I have ever read, so it’s difficult to give a full review of a journal having only read one issue. This may be the best, or worst, issue Willow Springs has ever put out, and I would have no idea.
That said, I was surprised by the amount of poetry included in this review. Most literary journals (in my experience) are usually made up of mostly short fiction with a small spattering of poetry. This was primarily poetry.
Now, I used to love poetry. I fell in love with Michael Ondaatje’s The Cinnamon Peeler and Lawrence Ferlinghetti’s A Coney Island of the Mind. In recent years, however, I have not been introduced to much contemporary poetry I liked. Poetry makes me uncomfortable- the really awful poetry is easy to spot- basic rhyme schemes or an attempt at Old English style poetry is always wince-worthy. Great poetry, I feel, is almost impossible to spot due to how subjective it is. That said, I don’t know what to say about the various poems included in this issue of Willow Springs. None of them spoke to me. None of them grabbed me by the heartstrings or the brainstrings or any other bodily strings. I would say they were mediocre. I would also say I have no idea what half of them were about.
Poetry either speaks to you or it doesn’t. I can say they were pretty well written, and I’m sure someone somewhere will be moved by one, if not all, of them. I just wasn’t.
The short fiction, however, was really great. Kerry Muir’s The Bridge was a beautiful snapshot of childhood in the early 1970’s San Francisco Bay Area. Two young girls are forced to play together one day, and through their eyes we’re given a brief view of the adults in their lives and the experiences that will shape who they become. Muir really brought me in to the setting quickly and with ease, I felt very immersed in their location and time.
Stacia Saint Owens’s “Color by Numbers” was the winner of the Willow Springs Fiction Prize. Owens played with form by telling the two stories of a boy and girl switched at birth in horizontal columns next to each other on the page. Portions that weren’t about the children directly were in long paragraph format with no indentation. This unique formatting was a little difficult to read (the girl’s story would continue to the next page while the boy’s would stop, or both would continue to the next page and it was hard to choose whose story to read first) but did create a very different reading experience. I felt as though their stories were occurring simultaneously by putting them next to each other like that.
The storyline was interesting as well. A boy and girl baby are switched at the hospital by accident, and we are shown how they develop in their false families and how one parent’s personality trait could have helped his/her biological child but instead was harmful to their supposed child. The story follows the boy and girl through to the end of their lives.
I have undertaken the mission to find one or two literary reviews I really like and then to follow them through subscriptions. Tin House is on my short list, but I don’t know if Willow Springs will make the cut.
Bent Shelf Book Reviews 