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"My Man at the Station," by Sanford Chernoff starts off:

     My train is late, later than usual getting in this evening. I was dozing. m mouth is dry and half my newspaper is on the floor.

The reader is left to wonder if this just having jarred to being awake is what causes the narrator's confusion only a paragraph later:

     He has obviously taken me for someone else. I was going to say something to this effect, but he's already using my first name and talking about my lawn. It has been giving me trouble lately, thought it seems incredible to me that he should know this.

Chernoff seems to let the reader off the hook fairly soon though as by page two, and a conversation with his wife, Dave, the narrator slides towad simply being an unreliable narrator. Or, are the conversations with his wife actually closer to real life meal conversations than we typically are allowed to read--one person talking about one thing while the spouse answers questions that were never really asked and vice versa? Perhaps Dave isn't as unreliable as the conclusion one might have jumped to so quickly.

Continuing to read, Dave's conversations with his wife stay as disjointed as the original one. He continues to talk to the man he met at the station, and the reader finds out that his son, Jules, is refusing to leave his room, causing great concern to Dave's wife, and eventually to Dave as well.

The main story, about Jules, and how Dave and Edna (his wife) handle his refusing to leave his room and how they deal with each other, and the slow progression of it, is tempered well by the inclusion of the man at the station, and Dave's subsequent meeting with him and then what might only be considered obsession with him.

Chernoff does a nice job mixing these storylines, moving back and forth at just the right times, and creating a cohesive little world.

I believe Paulette Jiles is the first (at least in the Table of Contents order) repeat Quarterly offender, as she had close to 40 pages of poetry in The Quarterly #1. This time around she tries her hand at fiction (though a peek at my review of those poems will find me wondering why I kept reading the poems in a prose fashion and ignoring the line breaks) with the short story, "Dune Trek."

Broken into seven sections over 10 pages, "Dune Trek" includes a fair amount of repetition and not in the simple idea of repetition of a single word, but instead the repetition of phrases or ideas:

"One of the men gets up, opens the door, and spits violently into the sand."

The idea that five miles out into the distance the curvature of the Earth kicks in and short items cannot be seen as they are below the site line of the person looking.

Fishbones, be they burned as fossils into the stone, or tattooed on ladies bodies.

These and more find themselves mentioned multiple times and in more than one of the seven sections. Jiles brings some aspect of rhythm to her writing beyond the above mentioned repetition and while I cannot be anywhere near sure what the story was really about, I'm not sure it mattered as I found myself caught up and enjoying it as I read it.

Mark Richard's short story, "On the Rope," starts:

     I have to tell my uncle it is just a bread wrapper, a crubbly piece of paper thrown up on the fence by the wind. I run out to show that is all it is, but the spell is already on my uncle. When I come back in from showing, it is just as well I should have stayed inside.

Just under four pages later, it ends:

... They stood looking, giving good hard long looks, because they knew, like my uncle knew, that once we were back up the bayou they would never be able to watch a stew pot boil, or look at something caught on barbed wire ever the same again, even with someone like me coming in to show it is nothing but a crubbly piece of nothing thrown up on the fence by the wind.

In between those paragraphs are just under four pages of fantastic sentences and images of the bayou post-something terrible where the narrator's uncle was forced, seemingly by soldiers, to take his boat out into the water to help them scoop dead bodies in various stages of disfigurement up out of the water, down from branches overhanging the water, etc. Richard hits these images hard enough with his prose that the reader is right there with the uncle by the end, fully understanding why seeing a crubbly piece of paper up against a fence might just create a much more frightening image in his head.

A quick example:

     My uncle said the girl swimming on the barbed-wire fence had skin that did not come off in his hands like the skin on some of the others did.

or

... The baby was cutting through the current with its arms and head thrown back like it had just broken up to the surface to take a long deep breath that it was still taking.

My understanding is that this story is in Richard's debut story collection, which I believe I have somewhere in the boxes from a long ago purchase that I don't remember reading. I'll be looking for it now.

The second issue of The Quarterly (which on the front cover has a subtitle that appears not on the title page within--The Magazine of New American Writing) begins with a short story from Noy Holland. It's titled, "The Absolution." It begins:

     Me and him, we're lovers. Sure, I know, he's a crazy motherfucker--and I'm the Banana Queen of Opelousas. They say I'm the prettiest since Luana Lee.  But you best clap your eyes on Jimmy--he is something, too.

Holland's writing is full of these slightly odd turns of phrases like "Me and him," and "you best clap your eyes on." They aren't quite different enough to stop you from reading as your eyes pass them by, but they do get you to slow down a little bit and make sure you understand exactly what they mean. One thing, if you read them aloud, they tend to flow really well, leading me to believe there's at least a touch of aural writing on Ms. Holland's part.

Holland also has a nice turn with similes, as for example:

I seen his bare black arms, though, veins standing out like hard-ons in church.

Again, just different enough in thought process and phrasing to get you to slow down a bit. It's not at all an uncommon thing for me when reading stories or poems or "letters" from The Quarterly--slowing down my reading that is.

Another aspect of Holland's writing is just how well her descriptions allow the reader to visualize what's going on:

     If I ever flew, it woudl feel like this, like the earth was just something long gone. I got a big heart and can hold my breath, and when I go deep in this black, black river, my whole body disappears. I can feel water wanting me. I know it's a sin, but I open my legs. I shout Jimmy's name so it turns to music by the time that it finds air.

I found the story to be a great beginning to this issue.

December 24, 2009. That is when I began reading the first issue of The Quarterly. Or at least when I began posting about the issue, one post per each author, from beginning of the issue through to the end. The end, which happened mere minutes ago, July 23, 2011. Not the greatest pace in the world, especially when one looks and sees that the last 15 posts were done in the past 13 hours or so.  Seems maybe I could have wrapped up this issue a few months ago, at the very least.

There was definitely a moment shift when I finished reading the stories and novellas of the first half of the journal. The poetry didn't hit me the same way and re-reading some of it recently and then finishing up with the authors that I'd yet to read finds me still not appreciating the bulk of the poets nearly as much as the prose writers. Then hitting the letters was maybe even more hit or miss--I either really found something to dig into, or stumbled through wondering what in the world had caught Gordon Lish's attention that winter/spring 24 years ago.

I've discovered authors I was not previously familiar with that I really like (and have gone on to find more of their work) like Peter Christopher and Jane Smiley (who I knew of but had really not read before) and a pretty incredible range of styles and approaches to the written word. In the end I'm glad enough I started the project to know that I'll move on and do the same thing with issue 2--just at a slightly better pace I hope.

Dan Duffy to Q is the last letter, the last bit of prose (there is one final Nace page but I've not commenting on any of those, nor do I plan to) in the journal and it's a bit of a disappointment. With some of the fiction/prose as language driven as it was, Ithought the Cullen would have been a fitting ending. The Duffy on the other hand is more straightforward and just really didn't grab me as an exciting piece, neither in the writing, nor in the situations presented. There's a bit of a history lesson of the narrator's city and life, and places with counters (as in food counters) that he's dined at. There's more to it, it's also about the lifestyles that we each choose, but again it simply didn't stun me as some of the pieces in the issue did.

E.J. Cullens to Q is full of interesting language and turns of phrase.

     Was when we to the graveyard went, checked out the stones. Walked high down the grass, climbed two hills, flagled wood, strendled a stream strembling through. An old Dutch Craven. Place of simple, stergend people, unhurried in their verdin lives, grackel and God-fearing, grain-fed and willow-shaded sandstone slabs.

is the opening paragraph and while I don't profess to fully understanding it (had to hit the dictionary more than a couple of times), I really like how his paragraphs and sentences sound when read aloud. There's certainly something to them beyond simply the language and each time I go back that something becomes a little clearer, but not enough so that I feel the ability to expound on it just yet. But I like the words enough to continue digging and know eventually I'll be right there with Cullen.

Robert Jones to Q is a three page paean to words through a discussion about a relationship (through letters--she was in prison) with Squeaky Fromme. He notes how through events from his childhood he learned words such as suicide (Marilyn Monroe's death), assassination (JFK's death) and decapitate (Jayne Mansfield's death), and how:

There was a word for everything. The world became at once larger than ever imagined and more claustrophobic. It was impossible to get past the words.

And interestingly enough, he notes in it that Fromme didn't like the written word, didn't find it had the power that the spoken word did.

Patty Marx to Q is more like a stream of very short diary entries than anything else. Beginning at number 635:

     Apples I set up to paint went rotten and fruit lady says she won't get any more of that kind until next year. Fruit lady says try winesaps, they taste just as good. This is not to the point, but it is no use explaning Art to fruit lady, so I end up buying five winesaps to be polite.

and going through 672:

     Lucy cannot accept criticism. Her art will never grow beyond the sash.

And in between there is a fairly interesting discourse on art and various viewpoints about it involving the narrator, the aforementioned Lucy (who created a line of sashes that achieved commercial success) and the narrator's brother and father, both successful in business.

Amy Hempel to Q has already been discussed at these pages as I believe it's actually the second half to the first story in this issue of The Quarterly, "The Harvest."  It begins:

     About the piece of fiction I have with you in this issue--I just wanted to say that I leave a lot out when I tell the truth.

At that starts off like a letter to The Quarterly. It's her to Lish about her story. The thing is, if you read the story in a collection, it includes this portion (now I do have to go back, I believe that the line "About the piece of fiction I have with you in this issue" has been deleted).

I don't know if she truly wrote the first half as a stand-alone story and then when explaining how she felt it worked to Lish realized that her explanation fit well, but either way, it works very well.

James Laughlin to Q is actually a short (four page) play that I have to be honest about--I didn't get it at all, nor did I very much like it. I think it takes a certain skill to pull off a slangish dialog and the opening of this play:

BIG PIPE:  Wot yer smokin' terday, little shiner?
LITTLE PIPE:  Just the useral.
BIG PIPE:  That doan smell ter me like Dunhill Number 13.
LITTLE PIPE:  'Tis too.
BIG PIPE:  Are you hidin' something from me, duckums?  Like a bad habit?
LITTLE PIPE:  Wodzit to yer?

really doesn't cut it. And it really wasn't until typing it out that I even noticed that for some reason Big PIP would lose the ending g from smoking and hiding, but NOT from something? Why would that be?

My guess is that there's some Greek classic that this is a modern version of that knowledge of would help my understanding of this particular effort.

Harold Brodkey to Q just might have started off as a letter, Brodkey's response to Jonathan Yardley's essay from the Washington Post titled "Harold Brodkey and the Cult of the Self," but somewhere along the line it turned into an essay response. As there was no previous issue of The Quarterly, one must assume that while maybe there were calls for submissions in other journals in advance of the issue, the letters to The Quarterly might have been solicited? It's my assumption anyway. As Lish had brought Brodkey over to Knopf, I can certainly envision a point where he might have read the Yardley critique (which from what I've read, which is to say an article about Brodkey and that essay from the Chicago Reader and this piece by Brodkey being written about here) and suggested Brodkey use his new journal to write a reply.

The essay itself is very well written, seemingly well argued, and well worth the 10 1/2 pages of space it takes up, ending with:

     By the way, Mr. Yardley, I am willing to be judged finally on what I have pubished so far. It would ahve been far too difficult to grow to the age I am without publishing sufficient work for that willingness to be the case when I haven't published the book and when the work involved in publishing it is so onerous.

Pagan Kennedy to Q is the first example of a work that I'm not able to even consider reading as a letter--it reads to me as a short story, one where the author sneaks on in, but more in that post-modern way than in a "this is a letter" way.

After an introduction about the author's friend Jenny:

... Jenny would like to think the women would. Jenny would like to think the women would make earth fertile again. Jenny would like to think that the men would right away take to the lightless and ruinous lunar landscape. But, really, Jenny knows that you would not solve this thig, this whole man/woman thing, by simply making all the men on earth move out.
     I think I'm qualified to say what Jenny thinks; I know her pretty well. I know Dave well, too. If you know a person well, that person lives a life inside your mind sometimes far more epic than that person's own life. Inside my mind,there is a Jenny and a Dave, and inside my mind, they think.

Between this and the following two pages I simply see an author writing maybe more about authorial view, about reliability of narrators, and doing so in the form of a story about Jenny and Dave and relationships.

As this final push through issue number one of The Quarterly rolls on, we get to the letters portion, where instead of a simple author name heading the page, we get the author name to Q, and to be honest, it's a bit of a confusing section to me in each and every issue. Am I, the reader, supposed to believe that these were indeed letters written to The Quarterly and Gordon Lish? Or that they're simply non-fiction? And I can't really believe that seeing as some of them throughout time (including one in this issue for instance) have been published within short story collections. Anyway, the following posts until the end of this particular issue all deal with "to Q" pieces.

The first of these is by Nancy Lemann and feels to me to be a really cool travel essay:

     In Paris en route Cairo with group of six harebrained New Orleanians being led by broken-down, emotionally upset Egypologist from Boston.

And so it begins, and Lemann continues in that slightly cryptic style, with a lack of articles, throughout the entire piece. It made for an interesting read, both with that style and the topic kept my attention as well. It is a good start to this section.

"What Boly Seed" from Brian Evenson appears in issue 27 (Summer 1994) of The Quarterly. It jumped out at me as the title didn't make any sense to me--What Body Seed--what could that mean? What type of seed was a Body seed? So I began reading the story itself:

Boly seed her the first, her head all cave in and her leg-split hacked nigh up to her ribs, and saidto hisself, Well, now, What have we?

What? Okay so seed is not something you plant in the ground, but something you did in past tense, not saw but seed.

"Ye done good," he told to his dogs, and made for them to sat their buttholes flush to the ground and stay there for him until he tossed them shards of lint-covered jerky fished up from his pocket bottoms. He wasn't too eager to call out for Rollins yet. He locked his triggers up, leaned the shotgun against a maple, and got down there on knees. He got hisself a twig and used it to lift the hair outta her face, adn seed he didn't know this one, no how. Some quite a face on her though, and he may could see what to make a man do her plain and simple, though the cutting and the head job, they wan't no reason for it, far as he could tell; they was mystery. But whatever be the reason of it, no how were this the reward girl.

And so continues Evenson's short tale. My initial wariness of reading a story all with this type of language was eliminated as Evenson writes a story that was going to keep my attention no matter what language it was in and really, after getting through that first paragraph, it was interesting to me just how quickly my mind adapted to the language, to the oddities of it. I rarely found myself, throughout reading the rest of the story, stopping to have to think about what a word really was or what a phrase meant to say. I was very impressed with the consistency of the language and voice within the story, which I'd think had to have some difficulty in finding.

This story is only three pages long in this journal but it may have caused me to think about it, about language, about how my own mind works when I read, than any other story I've read so far this month. Did Evenson create a world (even in a scant three pages) just different enough than the one we live in to justify the slightly offbeat language? I think he did. Does the typical reader's mind adapt quickly to something like this or is it experimental to the point of possibly losing readers? Not sure on that one; not at all. Why in the world would the characters behave as they did? That was the easy one, it's an Evenson story.

If you can dig up a copy of this issue of The Quarterly, do so, it's loaded with great stuff. This story can also be found in Evenson's first book, Altmann's Tongue, as part of three Boly Stories.

The postman was stealth today--the dog didn't bark to alert his arrival, and he was also cool as hell, putting the book packages in between my doors and not leaving them on th wet porch (as he did one day last week).

The Quarterly issue 30 arrived today--this is the first one of the issues produced in Canada that I've received.  For those keeping track, I now have issues 1-25 and 30.  This one has writing from: Terese Svoboda, Christine Schutt, Sam Lipsyte, Greg Mulcahy, John Fulton, Brian Evenson, Gary Lutz, Sheila Kohler, Michael Kimball, David McLendon, Cooper Esteban and Ken Sparling among others.

A package from Open Letter Press contained two forthcoming novels:  The Guinea Pigs by Ludvik Vaculik, translated from the Czech by Kaca Polackova with illustrations by Jan Vaculik (sorry for the missing accents as I have NO idea how to add them here) which is due in May. From the press paperwork:

A clerk at the State Bank begins to notice that something strange is going on--bank employees are stuffing their pockets with money every day, only to have it taken every evening by the security guards who search the employees and confiscate the cash. But, there's a discrepancy between what is being confiscated and what it being returned to the bank, and our hero is beginning to fear that a secret circulation is developing, one that could undermine the whole economy.

Due in June, The Book of Happenstance from Ingrid Winterbach, translated from the Afrikaans by Dirk and Ingrid Winterbach. From the press paperwork:

An alternately sublime and satirical meditation on love, loss, and obsession, Ingrid Winterbach's The Book of Happenstance is an emotionally affecting masterpiece from one of South Africa's most exciting authors.

Two non-books arrived yesterday as well, but I think they can sneak into this post as they are: Justified, season one on DVD, and Treme, season one on DVD. How many reviews or essays refered to The Wire as being just like a novel?  Many did. And Justified is based on an Elmore Leonard work (I am positive this is the first time ever that two consecutive posts reference Elmore Leonard, and it's probably about time), and Treme is by the man behind The Wire, David Simon.  Both shows are great in their storytelling and storytelling techniques.

Robert Gibb has five longer (all at least a full page in length) poems and unfortunately, the thing that stood out the most to me wasn't specifically the work itself, but the fact that every line, whether it was after a period or not, started with a capitalization.  I realize that if you're typing a poem in MS Word this will happen to you, but it's not difficult to remove and replace with lower case letters, so I have to assume that Gibb meant for the work to have this--I just don't understand why.

From "The Knife":

"We have not yet stumbled

Against the furnaces of steel

Mill and marriage.

                          Tonight

It is his father who careens

Into the room, smiling and drunk,

And holding to his mouth

A blood-soaked towel

And the knife he's been using

To cut loose a tooth.

There are three poems from Linda Gregg up next in this issue of The Quarterly, none of which is overly long.  The first two in particular gave off a particular sense of history that I liked:

From "Whoever We May Finally  Be, Said Rilke":

Seeing the bodies at Belsen is not simple.

Bodies the shape of their bones, mouths,

and the fresh holes in the earth.

The illusion of tenderness in the arms and hands.

The people who were in charge standing in warm

     coats

on the dirt ridge above watching the excavations fill

with corpses. Other soldiers carrying other dead.

Two pulling a body with its lax hand dragging

on the dirt. Worst of all is seeing

how beautiful these bodies are in their ruin.

I simply found the poem(s) putting me in these locations, creating a visual for me that I guess I expect when I read prose but am still surprised by when it happens to me when reading poetry.

Having finished the Jane Smiley novella, I found myself in the land of Quarterly poetry.  The first poet is Paulette Jiles, with "The James Poems," thirty poems spread over forty-three pages.  As I've noted before here at the EWN, I'm not one versed in the language of poetry, or the various styles.  However, I kept finding myself reading these works as prose and not poetry.  I wasn't finding meaning or reason for the line breaks.  In such cases, I usually blame myself, my lack of understanding, and my lack of having read volumes of poetry to date.  As I got deeper into this near chapbook worth of poetry though, I found myself blaming myself much less than I usually would.

From "Frank Surrenders: October 5, 1882"

"I have known no home, I have slept in all sort of

     places...I am tired

of this life of taut nerves...I want to see if there

     is not some way out

of this."

I might not have mentioned that the poems are about Frank and Jesse James--the James Gang.  Having read these, I did feel like I knew much more about this family and time period than I did before sitting down with this issue. I just didn't feel like I'd read a lot of poetry.

Today the postman dropped off three packages, plus an envelope with a check for Dzanc Books from one of our Dzanc Day workshoppers!

First up was a hardcover copy of Bette Pesetsky's story collection, Stories Up To A Point (Knopf, 1981).  It's a collection of 15 stories and 114 pages long (to give an indication of typical story length).  I had not too long ago read a short piece about this collection by Justin Taylor in The Believer, and then it was also brought up by Michael Hemmingson at his blog, Gordon Lish Edited This.

The second package contained another hardcover, Dawn Raffel's In the Year of Long Division (Knopf, 1994), her debut collection of short stories that has 16
stories in 117 pages (again, think typical story length).  This one I've read and loved before but needed a new copy for a special ongoing project Dzanc has recently announced.

Lastly, issue 17 of The Quarterly.  This one contains work from Sam Michel, Tom Rayfiel, Darrell Spencer, Diane Williams, Rick Bass, John Rybicki and Cooper Esteban.  A much shorter list of authors that I'm already aware of than usual--which I take it to mean leaves a lot of great new writers I get to discover!

The postman was kind today, bringing me three packages of things that I'd recently ordered, and one package from Richard Nash and Red Lemonade.

First opened up the box that came--it contained Stephen Graham Jones novel, All the Beautiful Sinners.  It starts off:

"The birds.  He told her he wanted to see the birds."

This was the one hole on my SGJ shelf and Richard Thomas has told me over and over it can NOT be the hole on that shelf.  I look forward to the read soon.

The package from Mr. Nash (and that Mr. is out of full respect.  Richard is a good friend and I doubt he's my elder by too many years, but if I know anybody deserving of that Mr. it is him).  It contained Lynne Tillman's Sometday This Will Be Funny, a collection of stories from Red Lemonade, slogan?  "Making the future a joy for writing and reading."  Simply put, if Richard is publishing it, I will read it.  And I've read some of Lynne's writing in the past and like it myself.

The other two envelopes contained, drumroll please, yeah, if you've been reading along lately, I'm sure you'll be stunned to find out they both contained issues of The Quarterly.

20 has work from Ben Marcus, Brian Evenson, Dawn Raffel, Sheila Kohler, Matthew Sharpe, Lily Tuck, Victoria Redel, Jason  Schwartz, Richard St. Germain, Diane Williams, Michael kimball, John Rybicki, Cooper Esteban, and Gary Lutz.

21 has work from Greg Mulcahy, Dawn Raffel, Victoria Redel,  Steve Stern (the novella "Zelik Rifkin and the Tree of Dreams" which I read last year from his trio of novellas that is incredible), Jason Schwartz, Michael Kimball, John Rybicki, and Cooper Esteban.

A couple of slim packages were in the mailbox this afternoon.  One from Magic Helicopter Press contained Jen Gann's back tuck, a collection of sixteen stories that I believe are all three pages or less in length.  I actually don't remember if I knew it or not but per the back page it's a limited edition first printing, with this being number 25 out of 75 copies.  I'm always a little curious if those are mailed out in order--does that mean that after maybe an author copy and publisher copies that I was the 25th person to order a copy? It's really a nicely put together chapbook with a harder stock of paper for the cover, nice end pages inside and then the stories laid out very well with some images occasionally popping in as well.  For $6 it seems like a bit more than a nice job.

I also received issue 13 of The Quarterly.  Once this latest rash of purchases I've made all arrive I'll have the first 25 issues of this pretty incredible journal.  This one had a surprise or two in it.  It opens with a story by Tim O'Brien and he's just not somebody that pops into my head when I think of this journal.  There's also a story by A.M. Homes that I'm trying to remember if I've read before.  The issue also includes some newer favorites from other issues of The Quarterly like Patricia Lear and Michael Hickins.  There are also a couple of poems by John Rybicki!

Lastly, perhaps the most exciting item.  This was also in the Magic Helicopter Press envelope as they are a publisher that participates in the Mudluscious Press Stamp Story program.  The story they sent me is by Elizabeth Ellen and it begins:

I have trouble sleeping in open spaces, I say.

There you go, even more reason to pick up one of Magic Helicopter's great chapbooks.

In "Anton's Album," Janet Kauffman gives the reader, in five short pages, a full look at an old friend/boyfriend(?) of the narrator, whose name was Anton.  This look is done through descriptions of photographs that she is explaining to somebody.  There are sixteen of these descriptions.

     1--All right.  In the grape arbor, and in the shadows, you can see me.  he put me in there, just to look out.  This is September, and he had forgot to prune in the spring.  Look at the tangle.

It takes maybe two or three of these entries before the reader completely understands what the narrator is talking about; the fact that they are looking at photographs.  It's also not until later, maybe the sixth or seven such description before Kauffman really starts to let some of Anton, and who he was, slip into the descriptions.

     8--Another picture of Anton's mother and me.  Anton never made excuses--he wasn't a photographer.  If somebody turned and the face washed out, that suited him.  He said what he wanted was evidence.

     "You two were here," he said about this one.  "Here's the evidence."

Kauffman came up with an interesting way of bringing her story to life through these photograph descriptions.  It's another story I'm glad I took the time to read from this issue so far.

The beginning of Kaye Gibbons' "The Proof" threw me.  There seemed to be some stretching to get a certain type of voice:

     I did not kill my daddy.  He drank his own self to death the year after the county moved me out.  I heard how they found him shut up in the house dead.  Next thing I know, he's in the ground and the house is rented out to a family of four.  Now I live in a clean brick house and mostly am left to myself.  When I start to carry an odor, I take a bath and folks tell me how sweet I look.

The "his own self" and "carry an odor" and then some similarly styled phrases in the next couple of paragraphs were pushing the voice to me--trying too hard to create a young, or simple, voice.  Once I let this slide past me however, and got into the story--simply put, some family strife, and beyond--I enjoyed Gibbons' writing. 

Re-reading the work, I'm not positive if I actually let that problem slide--beyond the first page in this thirteen page long story (the longest yet in this issue), there really aren't many examples of this.  It's as if Gibbons felt she created the voice early on and then no longer needed to rely on phrasing to keep it--she already had the reader.  And perhaps this is true based on my read and re-read.

Unlike Pamela Schirmeister's story, Yannick Murphy's, "The Slit," jumps right in with the type of language I expect when I read a story in The Quarterly:

Her mother was fat and she was fat and when her mother threw herself down into the grave, on top of her daughter's box, what I thought was that she was doing the Fat Man Dance with her daughter.

There is certainly fantastic usage of repetition here but even more importantly to my mind is Murphy's usage of rhythm.  I don't think you can read the above sentence without falling into a very specific rhythm, especially if you read it aloud (something I recommend doing with stories you'll find in certain journals such as The Quarterly, Unsaid and New York Tyrant, to name a few).

The story goes back and forth between this funeral scene and the narrator's remembrances of Jody, the dead girl.  It contemplates language, how we refer to things, where we hear the words or names:

I had never heard of a belly button.  It had always been pogo.

I thought, What is a belly button?  I thought, What kind of a name is that for my pogo?  I wanted to go home and I wanted to ask someone at home who started it that we had pogos, and why was it that all the other people had belly buttons.

And, again, I'd suggest reading that aloud to catch just how well Murphy uses the repetition that she does and how it changes how you would read it had the sentences been less complex. She continues this style right up to the very last line:

I thought about the rose being on top of Jody's belly and about the dirt being on top of Jody's belly and i thought about Jody doing the Fat Man Dance even after her mother walked away.