Reviews

The Powhatan Review is a testament to the tenacity of the creative impulse. Its founding editor Greg Avila, a heating/air conditioning installer and roofer as well as an artist, hoped it would be a stop against the voicelessness and invisibility that sometimes threaten the working class. In this issue, Richard Allen Taylor’s poem “Tuesday,” is a toast to the glamourless, taken for granted, not first or middle or last workday of the week: “Tuesday is grossly underrated, glad to be here, eager to get going. / [ . . . ] Tuesday is morning news and handy tool, the good dog / that comes when you call, the horse saddled / and ready to ride.” The subjects in Jason Hanasik’s photographs exude a kind of somber, world-weary strength that doesn’t seem to expect much anymore, but which achieves a kind of (cast in stone) transcendence simply by continuing to exist. Like some of the other work here, Hanasik’s people are presented largely without context, as if you sat down next to someone on a bus and he began telling you his life story. But since the particulars of a life are often used to discount the powerless, lack of background information can actually bring about a new attentiveness and sense of connection. The old paradox: sometimes the stranger on the bus will tell you more of his true story than he might ever bring himself to share with those closest to him. As Lee Minh McGuire puts it in his story “The Jesus Christ Smackdown,” “On the street, everyone is family, even though you’re never quite sure of a person’s real name.” McGuire continues, in what could be the creed of The Powhatan Review in its mission to chronicle the small, daily acts of hope and human endurance that receive so little attention: “But life goes on, I reassure myelf, and everyday above ground is a good day. As sure as I’m still breathing, things can change.”

If minimalism had a role model in format, it would be Powhatan Review, which only adds to the surprise and delight readers will discover in the depth and complexity of content. The magnet for me in this saddle-stitched format was the centerpiece: a b/w photograph by Mark Artkinson entitled “Vermont girls, summer at the beach,” which perfectly and preciously captures two distinct inner workings of young feminine psyche. The review promotes its content as “the ‘truth’ in details of real lives and hard won experience,” and this is apparent in the poems who titles alone speak these hard won truths: “Like a Beaten Rug” – “Love Letter to a Woman I Work With” – “Beside the Bed” – and “Onion, Dear.” My favorite among the dozen or so verse pieces was undoubtedly “Bones Lonely” by Don Winter which begins: “Some nights , I wake with longing / for nothing I can name.” And of the three stories, “Bananas” by Eugene M. McAvoy stole my heart with his depiction of Grandma and ‘nilla wafers and little Eugene stealing bananas because he was “hungry in the head.” For writers and artists as well as readers, this little book is worth a big, long look.