Pushcart at Fifty - the first third

 kw: book reviews, story reviews, poems, short stories, collections

Looking back I see I have previously read five of the Pushcart Prize volumes. This is the sixth: 2026 Pushcart Prize: Best of the Small Presses, 50th Anniversary Edition, edited by Bill Henderson and other editors. My esteem for the series has risen and fallen. This time around it is mostly high…so far.

Prior volumes took up around 550 pages. This one is 570 pages, plus another 47 pages listing every item published since 1976. The last page of the last story is 521; the rest is the apparatuses. That's a typical proportion. There are 77 stories and poems.

In the past few days I've read 19 items: eleven stories or memoirs and eight poems, and I skipped only one item. I do not take many notes as I read, but I do note down a very short "impression summary" to remind me. Perhaps it is instructive to record those (ignoring the one I skipped):

• "Rich Strike" by Christie Hodgen. mentoring and growth
• "When the Prince of Heaven Sleeps" by Roger Reeve. the softness of strong men
• "Ode to a Smith-Corona Galaxie Typewriter" by Angela Narciso Torres (poem). nostalgia
• "Tinder" by Sarah Green (sort-of poem). bemusing quotes by men
• "Golgori" by Peter Hong. outgrowing a deity
• "The Beautiful Salmon" by Joanna Kavenna. gaining perspective (young student among titans)
• "The End of Childhood" by Wayne Miller (poem). memoir or fantasy?
• "All I Love" by Chen Chen (poem). tree+poem = troem...cute
• "Desperate Times, Desperate Crimes" by Lou Mathews. optimism, against all odds
• "The Harvest" by Uche Okonkwo. collapse of one's dreams*
• "Like Mowing the Grass" by Bruce Beasley (poem). mowing metaphors
• "This is You" by Tommy Moore. the carry-stuff guy for a porn studio
• "One Writer Against Oblivion" by Mark Brazaitis. the title says it
• "Wilding" by Shara McCallum. metaphor of escape from childhood
• "Almost Born" by Keya Mitra. pilgrimage w/medical mistakes*
• "The Uber Men" by Nadir Jabur. experience doesn't always confer wisdom
• "It is Said" by Suzanne Cleary (poem). interesting, ambiguous
• "Siri as Mother" by Hala Alyan (poem). stream of [machine] consciousness, extra-long lines
• "On Arrival" by Sarah C. Harwell. finally beginning to grow*

*Three stories deserve a little extra comment. "The Harvest" is about a preacher whose congregation dwindles to himself and his wife. Having suffered a similar fate, before learning why God put me through it, I once said, "All my dreams have died," to which God replied only, "Your dreams, not mine." "Almost Born" has a woman learning, after about 20 miscarriages and finding a doctor who would take her seriously and do the right tests, that an early injury is the cause of her misfortune, not the oft-heard, "That's just the way you are," too late. I have a dossier of medical mistakes and I can more than sympathize. I am alive because I once forged a referral to a specialist! In "On Arrival" I find an amazing statement about the experience of many at a job: "…eight hours of emptiness in order to continue the activity of loving."

I find that I marked eleven items with a "+", including a couple of the poems. The rest were so-so or below. I have yet to find a piece that makes me say, "I am really glad I read that." Hope springs…