The Famous Thing About Death by Lisa Sandlin (review)

Reviews 257 Re Arts & Letters: Real West. Edited by Lee Schultz. Volume XVII, number 1, Spring 1991. 242 pages, $5.50.) The Spring 1991 issue of Re Arts & Letters (REAL), subtitled “Real West,” focuses on western letters and includes articles, fiction, poetry, reviews, artwork and photography. The volume features work by both published and previously unpublished writers and artists; the editor notes that some previously published pieces have been included to add to the prestige of the issue, although the journal as a policy does not usually accept such material. The poetry selections represent the strongest section of this special issue. Poets featured include Thomas Hornsby Ferril (a staff member of Harper’s Magazine whose western poetry was admired by Carl Sandburg and Robert Frost), James Hoggard, Violette Newton, Elizabeth Tallent and Ray Gonzalez. Reading the texts of the forty-nine poets, a picture of the West emerges that is composed of both past myth and present reality, a reality that Patricia Nelson Limerick might laud as appropriately eclectic. Ray Gonzalez’ poem, “Sitting Outside the Hotel Jerome in Aspen, Colorado, a White Butterfly Lands on My Shoulder,”gives the reader a portrait of a country where humans blend uneasily into a landscape that grants them only a tentative place. Elizabeth Tallent’s “eleven buffalo prayers,” reminiscent of W'allace Stevens’ thirteen blackbirds, manages to blend western lore with a contemporary ecological/preservationist sensibility through brilliant use of language. She mourns a West that perhaps exists only in our imaginations, yet nonetheless we mourn with her in reading this poem. The fiction section may be the weakest. Lenore Carroll’s “Letter Home” presents a stereotypical view ofwestern settlers; her narrative ofan eastern bride taken West by her soldier husband ends on an overwhelmingly sentimental note. Mary Vanek’s “True Love,” on the other hand, is set in a more believable contemporary Texas, where bumper stickers read “shit happens.” Fiction section aside, the issue’s photography and art work add to its overall aura, making this issue of REAL an item that collectors of Western Americana should find of value. SUSAN ELIZABETH GUNTER Westminster College ofSalt Lake City The Famous Thing About Death. By Lisa Sandlin. (El Paso: Cinco Puntos Press, 1990. 126 pages, $9.95.) If one wants to make a case for the necessary existence of small presses, one need look no further than this collection of short stories. Although two of these stories have appeared in Shenandoah and one in the Mississippi Review, four have not been printed before and thus would have remained in the memory of Ms. Sandlin’s computer, had not Cinco Puntos published this collection. 258 Western American Literature The stories are all Southwestern stories, taking place in Texas or New Mexico, but they are not in any way touched with what has become a regional stereotype. There are no cowboys, no pioneer women, no females trying to tame their men, no men trying to avoid taming. Instead we have a single woman who takes up with a bartender, though she feeds her soul on performing flamenco dances for Kiwanis Clubs; we have a fifteen-year-old girl who defines her space despite hassles from two guys; we have a man trying to cope with his demented father and angry mother; we have an Indian conscripted into the army. Ms. Sandlin has shown us characters we do not usually see in the literature of our region. And she presents us with conflicts that either are quiet and made dramatic or are dramatic and made quiet. The result is electric: her readers see things in a new way and see things they had never seen before. What is constant about her plots is the epiphany, sometimes that of the character and sometimes that of the reader alone—the “Aaah”reaction. In each story there is an insight, subtle and often puzzling. Ms. Sandlin’sstyle too is insightful and subtle through the startlingjuxtaposition of words and detail. Consider the following: “I envy Liwy not because she has the rugged gold look of a lioness but because she remembers past lives and so cannot be as unequipped as I am”; “Midstride, he turns to check—his father is...