Blue Mesa Review, Number 17

by Daniel Mueller (Editor)

In poetry, fiction, and essay, Blue Mesa Review Issue 17 presents as eclectic and idiosyncratic a vision of the world as any issue to date. A trainer of squirrel actors must reconcile his love of animals with the demands of his avocation when a Hollywood movie director insists upon sacrificing a squirrel to the altar of "high art." A 1940s teenager travels by train hundreds of miles from his home in Georgia in search of a secret bomb-manufacturing plant supposedly hidden in the Louisiana bayous. A Midwestern anglophile who has spent her adult life pretending to be a British peer suddenly enacts the role so convincingly that she herself believes the "truth" of her entirely fabricated ancestry. Containing new works by Mark Halperin, Michelle Brooks, Anne Coray, Sherry Simpson, Rigoberto Gonzalez, Bob Hicok, and many others, Issue 17 subverts expectations, defies categorization, and eschews the familiar. A treat for adventurous readers.

200 pages, Paperback

First published July 1, 2005