Athens, Ga. – The recently released Spring 2012 issue of The Georgia Review at the University of Georgia answers the question-“Is there any such thing as a free lunch?”-with a resounding “Yes-sort of!” in the form of a 105-page feature edition titled “Two-fers/Twofers.”
Some of the highlights from the publication include: two new and unusual personal-critical essays on one of the country’s most highly regarded writers, Eudora Welty; two essays on the scientific, cultural and political aftermaths of the historic Mount St. Helens eruption three decades ago; Mary Clearman Blew’s two versions of a childhood incident-one cast as fiction, the other as essay; a two-genre look-via poems and an interview-at Oprah Book Club author Robert Morgan; two reverse-image poems “In Praise of Surrealism” and “In Praise of the Ordinary” by Neil Carpathios; and a poem by Pulitzer Prize winner Maxine Kumin that is two poems presented in alternating stanzas.
The Georgia Review editor Stephen Corey, in his introduction to the issue, said that even if we can’t have the truly free, “…we can believe in ‘fifty percent off,’ in ‘two for one,’ in ‘buy one, get one free.’ In sum, in something more than we really deserve. We can believe-guiltlessly?-in ‘twofers.'”
This new issue also includes some noteworthy one-off offerings, including a poem by Pulitzer Prize-winning UGA graduate Natasha Trethewey and Darrell Spencer’s wrenching short story “Squeeze Me, I Sing” about a couple’s determination to keep and raise a profoundly disabled newborn.
Photojournalist Kael Alford, whose images of wartime Iraq appeared in the Review’s Fall 2007 issue, returns with “Bottom of da Boot: Losing the Coast of Louisiana”-14 striking photographs of landscapes and communities being washed away by natural and manmade disasters. Alford also provides a 12-page commentary on the making of this (much-more-extensive) photo series, commissioned by the High Museum of Art in Atlanta and to be on exhibit June 9-Sept. 2.
For further information about The Georgia Review, published quarterly at UGA since 1947, call 706/542-3481 or see www.thegeorgiareview.com.
