Posted by Robbie Held, GD Poetry Section Head for 5.1
After months upon months of sleepless and harrowing nights of editing, with only our immutable and eternal love for literature keeping us going, Gandy Dancer issue 5.1 has been sent to the presses packed full of art and literature with broad appeal. In the mood for fiction about a thrilling night of skinny dipping? Rachel Britton’s “Bare” will do the trick. Malcolm Flanigan’s “All Roads,” a personal tour of Rome, NY, will delight if urban decay is more your speed. Either way, the launch party is on the 20th of December, and we hope to see you there. I, for one, will be there wearing my finest oversized, pink IZOD sweatshirt.
Poetry has an equally diverse set of subject matter and style. As a poetry editor, it was my pleasure to accept poems like Carolina Fernandez’s “Waning Crescent,” in which strong play with white space lifts the narrative of a summer fling into a tense dream space. Alternatively, you can encounter “a rotating filter of phantom ooze” in the sweaty nerd dungeons of Nilson Thomas Carroll’s poems.
Returning to reality, Maya Bergamasco’s “Absolute Pitch” chronicles her struggle to come to terms with her mother’s imperious and distant nature. Bergamasco never becomes clinical in her analyses—we always have a keen sense of her mother’s humanity.
This semester we’re proud to publish an issue representing the wide variety of SUNYstudents. From SUNY Empire to Mohawk Valley Community College, from freshman to the more experienced writers we’ve got them all. Issue 5.1 of Gandy Dancer shows both the vitality of literature in our public school system and the vitality of the public school system itself.