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Foreword When I was younger, my nose was constantly in the thesaurus looking for a better word—a habit that fell away over time, perhaps because my copy of Roget's eventually became so old and moldy that I became, literally, allergic to it. Consulting it became an exercise in sneezing and stuffing back in loose pages. I should have bought a new one, but I have a hard time discarding old writing tools like that. It's very hard just to throw them into the trash. If they've become old, well, don't they deserve to continue sitting on one's desk, enjoying a dignified old age? The winter issue of the Missouri Review has caused me once again to consult my old friend. Diverse doesn't quite describe the issue, if only because it's such a trite word in this context. Multifarious? That's always seemed a limp word to me. Heterogenous ? No, too colorless. How about motley? That implies a certain shabbiness, doesn't it? We can't have our readers thinking the magazine is shabby. What then? How about prodigious—well, I won't deny that there's something prodigious about this issue, but isn't that a little excessive? Singular? No, too English. Anomalyous, odd, noteworthy, queer, unprecedented, newfangled, eccentric, grotesque , bizarre, outlandish—I can see I'm getting colder and colder. And so, after several sneezes, I return my old friend to its dusty desuetude, scratch my head, and try a new tact. This issue has a little of everything. A sampler: The poems represent a number of subjects and forms, but they do share, in Steven's phrase, "the mind of winter"—an imagination so stern, consolation is not its desire. The longest is Ai's "The Journalist," a poem that chronicles memories of the Vietnam war in the consciousness of one of its reporters. Stuart Dybek's "Benediction" and Jay Parini's "The Function of Winter" are meditations on the powers of landscape— an apocalyptic urban environment in Dybek and the winter season in Parini. Laurie Henry's ironic villanelle "A Former Dispatcher's Comment" is an account of punishing, mind-numbing, everyday work, and Sydney Lea's "In the Blind: For Tommy, My Oldest Friend"—another tough, funky poem—is about getting to be older, the process of memory, and memory's grace. Sándor Csoöri's series of elegies remind poetry co-editor Garrett Hongo of elegies by the twelfth-century Japanese poet Shunzei. Edward Hirsch's "Omen" is a tender lament for a friend about to die, and in Carol Muske's "Immunity," the poet thinks of her daughter in the light of a Japanese haiku about the death of a daughter. If this issue's fiction is any evidence, the old truism about fiction being primarily about family (and pseudofamily) does indeed carry some truth, since most of these stories are about parents and children— in particular, it so happens, fathers and daughters. Margaret Edwards' father in "The Find" represents a mystery to be solved, whereas the father figures in Catherine Brady's "Daley's Girls" and Mary Bush's "A Place of Light" are all too present. Joyce Carol Oates' "The Jesuit" is a very real look at a relationship that stubbornly refuses to happen, on any level. Our essays concern quite different topics: Carolyne Wright offers us one person's memories of Chile just before Allende's assassination. Rushworth Kidder's "Marbles on a Window-ledge" is about the youthful flowering of the aesthetic impulse in the small and beautiful world of—yes—marbles. Mark Crispin Miller's "Chattering Heads," a critique of the television media's handling of the last presidential campaign, excited a great deal of controversy among our editors, and I expect will do likewise among our readers. Hank Lazar's "Criticism and the Crisis in American Poetry" is an essay-review, with a polemic flavor, of recent books about poetics. In his interview, novelist Tom McGuane tells us what he thinks about everything from the artist's place in the economy to his own escapades in Hollywood. Last but by no means least, cartoonist Lynda Barry, in the words...

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