Harpur Palate
By Edited by Toiya Kristin Finley 

     I mentioned in my “Back to Literature” column at MyShelf.com recently that I have been receiving unsolicited books in my mailbox. I may soon be inundated and therefore make it a policy never to review any of them.

     Never say never. Today I received two back copies of a review journal called Harpur Palate. The odd name caught my attention, so I opened first one and then the other, musing all the while that perhaps this was part of the universal plan.

     On the back page I noticed that this journal sponsors the John Gardner Memorial Prize for Fiction. John Gardner’s books was the first book on writing I ever read, around 1965. I learned more about the short story form from him than I had in all the writing and literature classes I had ever taken.

     As for Harpur Palate, I loved the whole thing, even Editor Toiya Kristin Finley’s introduction, in which she wonders if anyone ever reads what editors have to say. The poem that won a poetry prize for that issue was called “Blue Man Group & the Shiftiness of Wu Wei,” by Ryan G. Van Cleave. Then I read Knute Skinner’s “A Suitable Guest.” Both poems were excellent. I can’t fathom how one compares and favors one poem over another, especially when they are so different.

     As it turned out, I read the entire journal from beginning to end in one evening. That’s when I decided to break my own rule and review these journals, more as a series than as a single issue. If I was so fascinated by a relatively obscure literary journal along the lines of The Atlantic Monthly, maybe MyShelf readers (many of whom are writers) would be, too. There’s lots of good stuff to discover in these journals: information on prizes, stories and poems to learn from, emerging authors to get to know. Learn more or order a copy at: http://harpurpalate.binghamton.edu/