This issue of Golden Handcuffs Review featured writing from Leslie Kaplan, Augustus Young, Pierre Senges, Ken Edwards, Francesca Duranti, Joseph Donahue, Matt Briggs, Toby Olson, David Antin, Victor Hugo, Charles Baudelaire, Jani Macarty, Peter Quatermain, Meredith Quatermain, Susan Smith Nash, Leonard Schwartz, Tyrone Williams, and A D Jameson.
I picked this issue up at a Barnes & Noble in New York City. It’s sleek shiny cover and interesting black and white photography drew me in. I read it mostly while laying in bed, though at one point I read it while sitting on my boyfriend’s parent’s deck drinking a beer and every so often admiring the view of the Ruby Mountains.
Of the 154 pages, I only got to page 115, at which point I gave up in frustration. Each story was just so extremely uninteresting, unengaging, and even rather irritating. Many of the authors were playing with form, some with extremely long run-on sentences, others with numbered paragraph segments, and even the use of random spaces between words. None of these literary “innovations” added anything to the works and mostly just made them difficult to read. I am always open to new ways of writing, but only if the plot warrants it or if it is done in a successful way. I did not see much success within the pages of this literary review.
I often had to force myself to finish a story, and sometimes wasn’t able to force myself to finish. The only story I enjoyed was Francesca Duranti’s fiction piece, “On the Opposite Side” which told a brief history of a writer’s life and how she got to where she was. It followed her from divorce to a trip to Singapore, describing how she came to stand on her own two feet and write. I’m sure this story could be compared with the hideous Eat, Pray, Love by Elizabeth Gilbert, but this was just a few pages long and seems to me to be far more interesting than Gilbert’s life.
I had a lot of free time, so I would cut and sew beautiful coloured kimonos, I would paint birds, I would bake special corn cookies from my Piedmontese grandmother’s recipe-book. Riccardo wore my kimonos, admired my paintings, devoured my cookies. Then, more or less in the same spirit, I wrote a novel. But this time, without trying to explain it to myself rationally, I felt I felt it was different. So I didn’t tell Riccardo, and I didn’t inform him that I sent the manuscript to a publisher. But then I had to tell him that it had been accepted and that it was going to be published. So he walked out on me. For good, forever. -Excerpt from “On the Opposite Side”
I had high hopes for this review, and I was very disappointed. I did love Joyce Ravid’s photography, however. They were cute yet strangely creepy black and white photos of miniature furniture.
I would not buy another copy of this review in the future. I did not feel engaged by the majority of the writing selected and I just think there are too many great things to read out there without wasting my time on this.
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