The force of the thunderclap that woke us this morning at 3 a.m. heralded good news: two more of our contributors have been chosen for two great anthologies!
Don Russ’s poem “Girl with Gerbil” (from Issue 8.1) has been chosen for the Best American Poetry 2012. He joins other contributors Julianna Baggott, James Kimbrell, and Dean Rader whose poems from The Cincinnati Review were also chosen for that edition.
Here’s what Don had to say about that poem (and another) from 8.1: “I’ve come to think that anything looked at closely enough becomes everything—or at least begins to reveal kinship with everything—in my world. Both ‘Girl with Gerbil’ and ‘Reunion’ grew out of autobiographical material I’d earlier recorded in notebooks. When at some point I sat down to think and to try to make it into a poem, each episode eventually began to breathe my deepest preoccupations: childhood and identity, relationships, questions about the very nature of reality and its relationship to human perception and creativity. To some degree they both became poems about art, about poetry itself.”
Also, Steve De Jarnatt’s story “Mulligan,” which appears in Issue 8.2 (to be released any day now!), has been chosen for New Stories from the Midwest 2012, guest edited by Rosellen Brown.
Steve had this to say about his story: “A real situation inspired this story—an ill-written law that for a brief time allowed parents to jettison children (even much older ones) in Nebraska. It’s pretty daunting to try to humanize people who would choose to do that, but hopefully some clues are given as to what brought them to the brink. I didn’t research much, just tried to imagine the chaos of how this might go down out in the boonies of the west end of the state. I was born in a little town just across the border in Colorado and was fortunate the law wasn’t in place back then. One character—a kid, butt naked, save for cowboy boots, smashing in windows with a hammer is something from my hellion youth.”
Though we think the heavens could thunder with applause when we’re not dead asleep, we’d thrilled for Don and Steve!
