Newohioreview.org is archiving previous editions as they originally appeared. We are pairing the pieces with curated art work, as well as select audio recordings. In collaboration with our past contributors, we are happy to (re)-present this outstanding work.

Issue 8 compiled by Ellery Pollard, Julia Smarelli, Benjamin Bird, Callie Martindale, Sarah Hecker, and Brady Barnhill.

By Julie Hanson

I couldn’t determine her age. She was trying not to look me in the face.
I was approaching a bank of blue seating at Gate B-8,
her bank of seating, and I sat next to her.
I got out my glasses and reading.
I put them back in my bag.
How could I read when the woman seated next to me and trying not to cry
was only mostly succeeding?
I rustled through the inner pockets of my purse
until I found the travel pack of tissue, crumpled from the years,
flecked with leather dust. But as I offered it up, I saw that she, Thanks, anyway,
had already produced her own.
Isn’t that just like us?-always a little something somewhere in the purse
which can’t alter reality in the large sense
but might help us along in the small.

Her phone rang.

She wiped her nose and answered with her name.
No, she couldn’t show the split foyer this afternoon,
but Cindy in the office could.
Some kind of confidence had happened in her shoulders. And her voice:
genuine, helpful. She specified the freeways to avoid and better ways to take.
It sounded like L.A.
Her voice played the notes of continual possibility.
There was one more door at the end of disappointment,
and this might be it, it just might. Hearing her speak,
there isn’t a client who wouldn’t have straightened a bit,
curiosity increased.

She slipped her phone into her bag and rearranged her legs.
I glanced obliquely to our right and said,
“You handled that awfully well, Karen, under the circumstances.”
Then she told me everything.

O’Hare International Airport

By Julie Hanson

Each morning my eye goes straight to the high bare branches of the ash
where a plastic HyVee bag tugs and puffs
but has no choice.

Well I won’t see that in France,
I say to myself, but the consolation is as temporary
as the trip will have been

once I’m standing here again,
staring at that bag
and thinking, Now that’s the kind of thing I never saw in France.

It looks so orphaned and waif-like
against the shiny gray bark of the ash and the muted gray of the sky,
so white, so insubstantial, so wanting,

and, even with its one red word,
so caught there in the tree.
I’m certain it can hang on to the branch that has pierced it

for another six weeks.
There may be another bag in the maple by then,
recently freed from a thatch of wet leaves

or come tumbling
lightly from the garbage truck
that will have taken on that day no offering from us.

On the day we come back, it will still be
bare as scattered bones out there,
not yet the middle of March.

The ground will be hard. The grass will be tan.
This is so like me,
imagining,

not the cottage roofs of flat stones
pictured in the Green Guide to the Dordogne,
the massive ramparts for the great gone door of Domme,

but the day after-these littered horizons, and winter
still trying to get out of the yard.
On the day we come back

the ground will be hard. The grass will be tan.
But there will come a day much deeper into spring,
a day shady and humid

in the unfurled foliage of June,
when I realize I haven’t thought about that bag in weeks
because I can’t see it at all,

I can’t see its branch.
The massive ramparts for the great gone door of Domme
will have lost a lot of bulk by then,

resembling more and more the sketch
on page twenty-one
in the Green Guide to the Dordogne.

By Michael Chitwood

1

It seemed that water did not want to be in the bucket.
Where was I going, so long ago?
The water leapt, it dove over the side of the bucket.
Why did the water not want to be carried?
Where did it want to go that it was not going?
The bucket’s thin handle cut into my hand.
My hand wanted to refuse the handle.
The water bucked. It made the bucket bang my knee.
The water jumped to me, darkened my clothes.

Where was I going with this quarrelsome water?
What spirit it had. It would not be held.
It held my hand reluctantly. It sloshed and tugged.
It gulped and knocked against the bucket.
It was hard-headed water that would not lie down.
I leaned away from it, my head cocked in the pull.
What would this water do, forced to go the way I went?

2

Men were running. Men that I had never seen before
were running. The fire was going where it wanted to go.
The fire went in four directions. No, five.
Up too. It climbed trees, a bright, hot child.
The men beat at the fire on the ground with brooms
and wide rakes. The tines of the rakes sang
like harps. The notes of the music were sparks.
The fire swayed and dodged the men.
When they smacked at the fire, it jumped.
Where the fire wanted to be was away from the men
and the men wanted it to be with them, wanted it close
but that is not what the fire wanted. It was wild to run.

By Robert Hemley

I wrote the next poem I’m going to read this
morning on the plane
I’m not sure it’s very good
but I kind of like it and I thought I’d share
my latest effort with you.
Would you like to hear it?
I think it’s going to be the first in a series
of poems about emergency exits
because I was sitting in the emergency exit row
and the flight attendant came around and asked me
if I was willing to assist in the event of an emergency.
I was tired and didn’t hear him
correctly and I thought he had asked if we were willing to exist
in the event of an emergency.
Which startled me because sometimes
I have suicidal thoughts and I must have looked
alarmed because he asked me if I knew
how to speak English and if I wanted to be moved.
I told him I thought he had asked me if
I was willing to exist and he laughed and said,
Oh sir, we assume the answer to that question is yes.

By James Davis May

You swore never to be

a ritual mourner.

— Czeslaw Milosz

My language and friends are behind me now.
A mile down Grodzka, I bought water and cheap bread,
then on my way to your church’s baroque spires
I passed the historical marker next to the bakery.
And here, in front of you, these red candles
have melted to rings, a day’s worth of flowers
pile up on your granite with five unread notes.
The odd, underwhelming feeling of tombs.
Is it from the disappointment of not knowing
what to do? I wait and leave,
head back what feels like too soon
into the painful sun where three teenagers
smoke at the ankles of some patinated saint
and a jackhammer pummels the sidewalk
into the wrong scene. The want for something
more than this common ugliness. So I look back,
but feel instead my palms, blasted by the pain
of what almost happened, go flat on the car’s hood.
I don’t know to watch where I’m going.

By Michael Griffith

Given the ever-shrinking gap between today and the grave and the ever-growing library of Books I Might Love (Should I Ever Get to Them), I’ve come to see the utility, even necessity, of making bold snap judgements and sticking to them. But over decades of reading one is forced now and again to reassess, and sometimes to repent a rashness.

About most changes of mind it’s mind it’s possible to flatter oneself. One’s unexpected passion for Middlemarch years later needn’t be a goad to recall how stupid or loony one was in school; no, no, here is a newfound maturity of which to be proud. One’s crabby willingness to like a few of Raymond Carver’s canonical stories isn’t a fig leaf for small-mindedness doggedly clung to even after you realized you were wrong; instead it’s proof that you are beyond the hotheaded dissings and envies of youth, and are now willing to grant old Ray, safely dead, a junior membership in the Pantheon, where he can at least be counted on to put Henry Jame’s knickers in a twist.

Yes, most softenings or hardenings of judgement can be managed in ways that keep self-loathing at by. But then there’s my failure to recognize the greatness of Grace Praley, a lapse for which I can find neither excuse nor explanation. For twenty years, I just plain BLEW it.

By Sylvia Watanabe

This brief narrative, perhaps no more than four hundred words in length, is
most often read as a ghost story. In it we follow the unnamed protagonist on
a journey of return to what may or may not have been her former home. With
her crossing of the river (a traditional symbol of transition) in the opening
scene, we enter a mirror world in which familiar places and things have been
made strange: the road widened but oddly unkempt trees and shelters van-
ished, the old house “added to and painted white.” The sky itself is described
as mirror-like, with a “glassy look that she didn’t remember.”

From the story’s onset, we see the dissociation in the central character,
which is a hallmark of every good ghost story, established through the un-
grounding of a memory and of what can be reliably known. Through the au-
thor’s strategic choice of the past progressive, the protagonist appears in the me-
dias res, as if out of nowhere, “standing by the river looking at the stepping
stones and remembering each one.” She is simply there; we do not know where
she has come from or how long she has been traveling. Here, and throughout
the following narrative, the specificity of detail, “the round unsteady stone,
the pointed one . . .” is deceptive. Rhys leads us to believe that the vivid detail
of memory is somehow telling us about this world, when in fact, it is telling
us more—through implication—about absences, about what the world is not.
Though “She” (the central character) is “remembering,” she has no history, no
place of origin, no name, no age. When she finally arrives at what we might
carelessly assume to be her former home, Rhys does not say that she ever lived
inside that house. Other clues are provided that she may have lived in the
ajoupa—a kind of rough wooden shelter about among the trees.

By Peter Ho Davies

Worse even than the books and writers we should have read but haven’t, are the ones we have read, but haven’t got.

Take Lydia Davis.

Admired by friends, colleagues, students and critics that I admire, I reread her periodically with a feeling of amusement and befuddlement. (The Emperor has no clothes! Or – wait – is it my eyes, the light? My hang-ups?) And yet reread her I do, partly because of the high opinion of those others, partly because of my anxieties about my own judgement, and partly because every so often some writer I didn’t get before will suddenly speak to me with visionary freshness.

Take Donald Barthelme.

You want to like Donald Barthelme (especially in grad school). The wit, the invention, the scampish coolness. He’s a day-go Kafka, a Beckett of the American dream, William Burroughs with better aim. I always wanted to like him, and yet for years the stories left me feeling not cool, but cold. They struck me as flip, easy, fish-in-a-barrel satires. And then I tried them again, in 2005 or so, and something was different, the stories laced me with a poignancy and a fury I’d never felt before. Part of the change was in me, of course. Older, wiser, and – crucially in my case as an expatriate Brit – more American. But part of the change was in our times.

Take this, from “The Indian Uprising”: “We interrogated the captured Comanche. Two of us forced his head back while another poured water into his nostrils. His body jerked, he choked and wept.”

The first fictional description of water boarding I’d read, and it dated from 1965.

Not all of Barthelme’s stories map so directly onto the Bush years, but their absurdity, as I reread them, felt tonally right, an appropriate, even an essential response to a cultural/political crisis, echoing the period of upheaval – the late 60s and early 70s – when many of Barthelme’s best works were published. Is it fair to read work like this as an anachronistic allegory, or fictional prophesy? Not entirely, probably. And yet, it’s a power of such work – Kafka’s most famously – that we reinvent it, repurpose it so. It’s tempting to wonder, too, if the rise of a loose school of contemporary absurdist writers (the “goofy realists” as a student once dubbed them) – George Saunders, Miranda July, Aimee Bender, Kelly Link, Karen Russell, etc. – might be a similar reflection of our times.

But of course, the times are still a-changing.

As I reread Barthelme in 2010 to draft this piece, some of that revelatory energy has receded (perhaps it’ll only return as the silver lining of the Palin administration), yet some has also advanced.

Take the opening of “The President”: “The darkness, strangeness, and complexity of the new President have touched everyone…”

By Karen Brennan

When I first read Virginia Woolf’s Orlando – about thirty-five years ago – I did not like it at all. In those days, I had been reading Woolf passionately. Like most Woolf devotees, I loved the idiosyncrasies of her voice, the brave way she took on the modernism du jour – her thinking, her sensibility, her scenes, her sentences. I’d become smitten with To the Lighthouse and Mrs. Dalloway and my all-time favorite (still!), Between the Acts; I’d read and reread A Room of One’s Own, and a chunk of her nonfiction (notably, her memoir Moments of Being and parts of A Writer’s Diary).

What entranced me about Woolf was her ability, even in nonfiction to create scenes as sensual containers for emotion – a kind of alchemical magic, as I saw it – scenes which, moreover, approximated real life much more wittingly than the usual fare of literary realism. I loved the feeling of inhabiting her characters/narrators, which was always complicated by Woolf’s own understanding of isolation and her yearning for connection.

None of this did I experience in my first encounter with Orlando. Instead, this novel, antic to be sure, seemed to me to be too agenda-driven, too in love with its own conceits – its history lesson, its gender games. Moreover, the characters were not – like Clarissa Dalloway, like Mrs. Ramsey – complicated by contrary impulses, by their own failures to understand, but rather wooden and unchanging. Even Orlando with all his/her transformations from male to female, from Elizabethan nobleman with “fine legs” to twentieth-century woman driving a “motor car” seemed, in his/her soul, untouched by the alterations of time or circumstance. Finally, I felt in Orlando an overly self-conscious, almost smug wit, a “biographer” (Woolf’s narrator, recall, is a tongue-in-cheek biographer) too in control of her subject so that, in the end, the novel was unsurprising and static, even with all its gimmicky surprises.

By Charles Baxter

This needling and unpleasant little book can easily upset readers who are expecting to find nice characters and inspiring behavior. The novel’s settings—a hotel room, a restaurant, a back office—are claustrophobic, and its dramatis personae show themselves to be weak or contemptible when they are not being viperish. Indeed, The Widow’s Children fits snugly in the tradition of the Viper Novel, with a centrally placed witty monster who makes mincemeat of everyone around her. In this respect, it resembles Jarrell’s Pictures from an Institution, a book that is much more fun to read. In short, there’d be no particular reason for reading The Widow’s Children if it weren’t a masterpiece of psychology. It is a great short novel, under-appreciated in the way that books about cruelty tend to be. The first time I read it, I couldn’t stand it—or, rather, I couldn’t bear it, which is not quite the same thing. Now I can.

Read More

New Ohio Review is archiving previous editions as they originally appeared. We are pairing the pieces with curated artwork, as well as select audio recordings. In collaboration with our past contributors, we are happy to (re)-present this outstanding work.

Issue 7 compiled by Rylee Reis.