issue 33 > nonfiction
-
Book Review
Wandering Electron by Lee Slonimsky
review by Iris Jamahl DunkleIn Lee Slonimsky’s fifth poetry collection, Wandering Electron, the scientific and technological knowledge that has been gained over the past century enables a scientific mind like Slonimsky’s to closely examine the scientific and philosophical significance of the natural world.
More… -
A Green Thought
‘Warbling Charms’ and ‘Matrimonial Treason’
by Paul D. GreenIn terms of the Circe myth, Samson Agonistes might be seen as a kind of epilogue, in which the Homeric/Ovidian enchantress makes her final appearance in Milton’s work. Since there is only a single reference to Circe in Samson, and one that Douglas Bush rightly calls a “veiled allusion” (p.293), I take for granted that, in an age when educated readers would have studied the classics, Milton expects them to be familiar with Circe and to understand the significance of all the previous Miltonic references to her, predominantly in Comus.[i] “The traditional interpretation of the myth of Circe,” in Bush’s words, “commended itself to Milton as inevitably as it had to Ariosto, Tasso, Spenser, and others for the presentation of virtue’s conflict with sensuality” (p.277), a generalization that certainly applies to Samson Agonistes. Inevitably, like his predecessors, and as he himself had already done in Comus and other works, he reshapes the myth one last time to suit his own purposes.
More… -
Personal Essay
Terminal
by Jen JollesIt is a week before Christmas, and I find myself standing in the kitchen attempting to cook, fighting with her over text message about how much I hate chemotherapy. The return rate of messages is comparable to machine gun fire in hostile territory. Every time I return to my phone, the three elliptical dots on the left hand of the screen shoot round after round of strong language into wartime air. I jab a knife into the cutting block with force and watch the handle sway as I do after an encounter with an open bar. I have reached my wit's end – with her, with this disease, with myself. As I look out the window to see the city covered in snow, I exhale in exasperation. I fucking hate the winter.
More…