A glossy and impressingly professional-looking poetry and creative nonfiction journal arrived in my mailbox recently. Two Review is the work of two UAA MFA grads — Brendan Noonan (2005) and Jeremy Edward Shiok (2003). It is packed with the work of international authors and some big names, including Marge Piercy.
An Alaskan, Toby Sullivan, provided the volume’s singular essay, “In Fallujah,” an excerpt from a larger work in development about Sullivan’s four trips to Iraq as an embedded journalist. Sullivan continues to write and fish commercially from his home on Kodiak Island. I’m always looking for more of his work and glad to see it here.
It’s easy to slap some literary content onto a website, but Shiok and Noonan have chosen the more old-fashioned path, gathering this volume’s material with great care, and creating an attractive bound book as a result. If you’re a poetry lover, check it out. And if you have your own work to submit, note their guidelines for the next issue.