This issue of Kalliope is the International Sue Saniel Elkins Poetry Award Issue, and, as you would expect, the poems are outstanding. Kalliope is a "journal of women's literature and art"; the poems and fiction featured speak to issues such as spousal abuse, death, manual labor, girlhood, adultery, and divorce, written primarily from a woman's point of view.
The thing I found most interesting about Kalliope is that it includes a poem by a male, as well as a poem written by a woman from a male point of view. For example, these lines from "Snow Blind," by Mary Baron:
I am a small man
compact
of skin and sinew
a moose heart bag
She is all
loose outlines
large to my smallness
pale to my brown
This issue also features an interview with poet Jill Bialoski, talking about her collection "The End of Desire: Poems," and "Wanting a Child," an anthology she co-edited with Helen Schulman.
The black & white renditions of artwork by Melissa Widerkehr are fantastic, and I would love to see the full-color pieces. The black & white photography by Gayle Rothschild was not as interesting to me, and seemed to be more of a proud soccer mom's photo album of her darling children ("Oh, now here's one of Suzie with one of her teeth missing, now isn't that just precious?").
I liked the great majority of what I saw and read in this issue, and must say that what is good about it shadows over the few faults that I found.
