Slipstream - 21

by Editors obert Borgatti, Livio Farallo and Dan Sicoli. SLIPSTREAM. slipstream.org

Book Review by Michael Basinski

Before you get to page 87 you read through poetry by Gerald Locklin, Dancing Bear, Valentina Gnup, Lyn Lifshin, Robert Penick(City Edition Breaks Down - a poem about greed, November and pitiful humanity in the face of tortured nature) and Rocking Chair Frank. Maybe you stop off at Ken Feltges’s poem: Happy Hour. You should. But then on page 87 begins a short story by E. R. Baxter III. The story is called: Jack Gets a Thesaurus. A treasure. It is a story, a short story that plays with the form of the short story. At each step in the narrative the narrator reminds the humble reader that the story is a fiction or a fiction being told by a writer, which is the art of the story. So the writing of the story becomes as much of the story as the story itself, which itself is a very important story about love, death, sons and fathers, coming of age, growing old and the form of our emotions in art and presenting of such in art. Still in the midst of the literary acrobatics there is a tremendous and deep earthiness or centered facet of the story. It takes place in Niagara Falls. The characters are as real as really created characters might be and their language complete with there own manufactured words are believable. Well-balanced and mature, Baxter’s prose finds the seam between the real and the making of art. He sits on this fence with one eye in each realm, reworking each separate reality into one finely woven masterpiece. And Baxter is working way hard to save Niagara Falls. All poets, you must save The Falls: www.niagaraheritage.org