Latest ‘Alaska Quarterly Review’ is packed with great reading

Alaska Quarterly Review, Vol. 39 Nos. 1 & 2, Winter and Spring 2023, edited by Ronald Spatz. 271 pages. $12 for a single issue or $20 for an annual subscription.

The Alaska Quarterly Review, known as the AQR, remains one of the nation’s most respected literary journals, publishing twice a year outstanding fiction, essays and creative non-fiction, poetry and plays. The new issue, the 77th and edited by Ronald Spatz, who founded the journal in 1980 with UAA Professor James Liszka, continues its streak of excellence.

This time the sampling festival includes nine short stories, five narrative essays, two long poems and a solid selection of shorter poems by 32 poets. Contributions come from all over the country and the world, covering different places, time periods and approaches. Many are longer than most journals publish; “AQR” is known for leaving the space needed for a fully realized work of art to unfold. While there is no overall theme, all of the pieces here, even the humorous or experimental, deal seriously with the “heart” in human experience.

AQR is not a regional publication, and Alaskans must compete with the best for inclusion. It speaks well for our poets that three Alaskans are represented here. Mar Ka, author of the Be-hooved collection, mentions in From Where I Flew how she left a Chicago neighborhood with its Eastern European spirits and Catholicism for a different life. Best known for her performance art, Allison Akootchook Warden reaches through time in Portal Traveler to admire “how they (ardent elders) kept the earth steady beneath their feet.” The volume concludes with a newly published poem by the late Eva Saulitis. In “Love Is What This Is,” a woman watches flocks of petrels take off from the ocean, then looks to the man who wants to share in what she is seeing. Love permeates the entire poem – the scene, the birds and everything they suggest, the woman and the man.

Among the short stories, the lengthy “Song of the Burning Woman” by Ire’ne Lara Silva conveys more of this love. The main character, Emma Elisa, is an artist who throws a Day of the Dead party somewhere near the Mexican border, with altars, marigolds, food, and friendship filling her garden. Each section introduces a guest with his, her or her story; It turns out that this community is made up largely of gay and trans people living rich lives complicated by family and religious expectations and overseen by “The Lady,” Emma’s tall cheerful statue. Here, towards the end, The Lady speaks herself: “That’s how I came. And I stilled the winds. And I calmed the border blood. I came here, to her home, humble materially and humanly, but concentrated with power as if lightning slumbered in it.”

Other stories feature an American merchant marine and a “bar girl” in the Philippines, a young girl whose girlfriend lives in a violent home, an addicted woman trying to be a good mother, brothers learning to swim, a boy raised a 1920’s ranch trying to learn how to be a man, a family confronting a member’s disability, a woman caring for the last living elephant, and a young girl trying to find her way in the opera is in love and confused about other forms of love. It is unfair to reduce such deeply meaningful stories to such superficial phrases, but such a summary perhaps indicates the breadth these authors have traveled in showing us the lives of others. Across a century, an ocean, a lifetime – we recognize our brothers and sisters, our fundamental equality.

Among the essays, “The Cave” by Debbie Urbanski is a real eye-catcher. This tremendously creative work crosses the line between non-fiction and fiction, as the narrator/author continually wonders how to tell the story – what to omit, omit, interpret in one way or another, even fabricate. On the surface, the story is about a family visiting a cave and stealing a backpack, which they leave outside the entrance. Circumstances fall aside, however, as the piece becomes more of a thought piece or meditation on race – and not in the way one might expect. The surprises here come with intense drama, humor, and the complicated emotions of a woman who is unsure if she should even be telling the story, and who doesn’t even admit to being part of the story – the author herself – until several pages later are. She later writes, “I’m not supposed to google things while writing to keep my focus, but in light of the recent protests I’m taking the liberty of googling how a white writer can write about race.” After considering her options, she writes She: “Excuse me while I return to the beginning of this story and name the race of each of my characters.”

One of the two lengthy poems, “Field Studies,” is by Alison Hawthorne Deming, known for poetry and essays that often relate to science and nature. Here, in eight parts, Deming examines some of what she learned at Bowdoin College Scientific Station on Kent Island, New Brunswick, Canada. As she says in an endnote, “This series of poems is something of a collaboration with a community of scholars who have devoted their working lives to learning what a remote little island in the Bay of Fundy had to teach us.” One tells the story of one rare albatross killed in the area, leading to the establishment of the science station. The rest tells of the bird and bee research conducted at the station, the last of which “Fog Heaven” placed Deming in a cabin formerly used by a cloud physicist. “But the stars/kept waking me/or slept/the ghost slept/in the corner/wrapped in tinfoil/and lush night/above me like/moss on a log.”

The other lengthy poem, Bruce Bond’s “Dove of the Morning News,” begins with an examination of Jesuit priest and scientist Pierre Teilhard de Chardin and his theory of the noosphere, a hypothetical “thinking layer” some say the Internet predicted has . The following stanzas trace the narrator’s own history of thought – in relation to science, technology, love, mortality, the issues of our interconnected time.

This latest “AQR” is one to spend time reading and re-reading, absorbing the many voices, beautiful language, perspectives and appreciations of our world.