Editors’ Page

1 EDITORS’ PAGE N ow in its seventh year, the Nelligan Prize for Short Fiction gives us cause for bittersweet celebration; established in memory of Liza Nelligan—a classmate, student , teacher, colleague, and friend of many here in the English Department at Colorado State—it reminds us of our loss. But by honoring her passion for literary fiction through this prize, we have the opportunity each fall to feature and celebrate the work of an outstanding short story writer. This year’s winner is Katherine Hill, for her funny, beautiful, and haunting story of grief, purgation, and conflagration, “Waste Management,” selected by final judge Andrea Barrett. Joining the fiction section are Laurie Ann Cedilnik, with “The Hottest Part of the Summer ,” concerning a man who must find a way to draw his wife and daughter out of their self-absorption as he faces an impending crisis, and Matthew Baker, with “Wink Wink Kiss Kiss,” a rich and near Gothic story in which a girl and her brother construct a deeply imaginative world to buffer themselves from the traumas of their chaotic family life. Among this issue’s nonfiction, we present Barrett Hathcock’s “Goodbye, Arkansas,” a reflective piece on the pleasures and perils of meditative driving; Barrington Smith-Seetachitt’s “Luck, Statistics, Magic,” an examination of how to interpret and cope with the language, logic, and math of illness; and Peggy Shinner ’s “Leopold and Shinner,” an essay that traces the origins of a letter to Shinner’s mother from one of the most infamous criminals of the twentieth century, raising compelling questions about crime, celebrity, rehabilitation, sexuality, and family. As always, we hope you find much that speaks to you in these pages. Welcome to the fall issue. —sg —— colorado review 2 A thing addressed, the intense empathy of Keats’s poem conspires with its intense sense of mortality to speak, even now, to something like the quality of the air outside . That glimmer of the posthumous, to which his life seemed early on destined, rises in this season like sap to “fill all fruit with ripeness to the core.” It rises, too, like smoke from a notso -distant fire. As I write this, I also scan the news for updates of yet another forest fire in the mountains of Colorado. Something of this urgency—both ripe fruit and impending fire—fills the poems of this issue. “The sun / swallows itself / or what is nearest? // Shines,” says Rae Armantrout. There is a logic to many of the poems in this issue that seeks to illuminate the shortened chains of both our attentions and our environments. From Laura Mullen’s ghostly Ninth Ward hammerings to the “ruin value” of Third Reich architecture in Christopher Lirette’s work, there is something premonitory afoot. “For all / falls, fails, fools, feels,” says Andrew Joron, “a ware aware / of the value of air.” This sharp focus manifests in forms, too—nomadic typography (Brenda Iijima), axial representations of “the colossal idea” (Virginia Heatter), and literal corn mazes of consumption (John Shoptaw). Translations from the French (Henri Droguet), Spanish (Enrique Lihn), and Polish (Grzegorz Wróblewski) provide global counterpoint to the fire, and a final blossom from Jonathan Williams adds something of history to the mix. Born in 1929 and passing away in 2008, Jonathan Williams was a key figure at Black Mountain College and the founder of The Jargon Society, publisher of many important avant-garde writers, from Charles Olson to Basil Bunting. Indeed, The Jargon Society, along with New Directions, Grove, and City Lights, is the model on which non-commercial small press publishing is based, and his appearance here is a nod of gratitude. An accomplished essayist and photographer as well, Williams’s (often) found poems are pungent, droll, and deeply diagnostic. I am indebted to his longtime partner, poet Thomas Meyer, for assistance in gathering “Some Late Jargonelles.” —matthew cooperman Season of mists and mellow fruitfulness, Close bosom-friend of the maturing sun; Conspiring with him how to load and bless With fruit the vines that round the thatch-eves run; To bend with apples the moss’d cottage-trees, And fill all fruit with ripeness to the core. . . . —Keats, “To Autumn...