Athens, Ga. – The just-released Winter 2014 issue of The Georgia Review completes the journal’s 68th year of continuous quarterly publication at the University of Georgia-and its contents illustrate that people need not always abide by the well-meant but sometimes-limiting bumper sticker mantra of “Think globally, act locally.”
Contributors include Athens librarian Maura Mandyck, retired UGA professor Doris Kadish and a second UGA retiree-Coleman Barks-who lives just minutes from the Review office but whose international reputation as a poet and translator is virtually unmatched. Other writers included hail from California, Colorado, Connecticut, Illinois, Kansas, Louisiana, Michigan, Minnesota, New Jersey, New York, North Carolina, Virginia, Ohio, Tennessee and Washington.
The diversity of content is even more striking. Carol Ann Davis’ essay, “The One I Get and Other Artifacts,” portrays the experience of living through the Newtown massacre, which was just miles from her home, without losing either of her children to it. Karen Hays weaves “Auto-Duet,” an imaginative and complex essay involving childbirth, Marie Curie, Jacques Cousteau, Life Savers, the first stethoscope, the Titanic, Picasso and more.
Kadish helps the Review to do something rare in a quarterly publication-offer new news. While doing research for a possible biography of her long-deceased mother, Ethel Richman, Kadish came across a substantial cache of Depression-era love letters from one Philip Greenberg-who would soon change his name to Philip Rahv and, in 1934, would co-found the Partisan Review, quickly to become one of the leading American literary-political journals for the next several decades. For Kadish, the result of this unanticipated discovery was at first shock but eventually “A Young Communist in Love: Philip Rahv, Partisan Review and My Mother,” an essay that rewrites Rahv’s early biography-to say nothing of Ethel Richman’s.
Mary Hood, a recent inductee of the Georgia Writers Hall of Fame and a short-fiction stalwart for the Review since the late 1970s, is present with “The All or Nothing It Had Come To,” which begins, “Viviana heard the gunshots through the woods, and the scream of the cat. What could it be but tragedy? A call to arms.” And Lynn Schmeidler makes her third appearance-all three of them distinctive and rollicking-with “Being Stevie,” the tale of a woman who finds herself much better able to live as someone else: “See the stage. The short woman in the platform shoes is me, as Stevie Nicks.”
The art portfolio by Mequitta Ahuja, “Automythography,” presents forceful self-portraits set against lush backgrounds reminiscent of her African-American and Indian parentage. And, for only the second time in the history of The Georgia Review, some of the works are reproduced on a five-page foldout. UGA’s Lamar Dodd School of Art Galleries will host an exhibition of Ahuja’s work from Jan. 30 to Feb. 26, and the artist will be present for an opening night reception and program on Jan. 30 that will serve as an issue-release party.
Sadly but importantly, this Winter 2014 issue features the last of some 50 essay-reviews of new poetry written for the Review by Judith Kitchen since the late 1980s. Described by one critic as “one of the two or three leading poetry critics in the United States and one of the five or so in the English-speaking world,” Kitchen died on Nov. 6 at the age of 73.
For additional information, see www.thegeorgiareview.com, call 706-542-3481, or e-mail garev@uga.edu.