Bennington Review, Issue Five: Fauna
The newly relaunched Bennington Review has released its fifth issue, featuring innovative poetry, fiction, creative nonfiction, and film writing around the theme of “Fauna.”
This latest Bennington Review is populated by a number of bears, a scorpion, a ringtail cat and a cat with disappearing teeth, dogs and horses, bats and lice, a pufferfish, a headless chicken, a nervous bunny, a hummingbird and "crows in their dark congresses," a plush toy monkey, "a firefly in the jaw of a lynx," a man who grows antlers, a woman gradually turning into a unicorn, and a domesticated talking bobcat.
"In assembling this issue, we were conscious of biologist Edward O. Wilson writing earlier this year in The New York Times that 'most species still alive will disappear without ever having been recorded,' said Bennington Review Editor Michael Dumanis. "We were inspired by the multiplicity of original ways our contributors have recorded and reimagined their experiences of the animal world."
The issue includes Ursula Villarreal-Moura's short story "Mucci," which focuses on how an unhappy newlywed harbors feelings of jealousy and resentment toward his wife's toy monkey.
In Stephanie Reents's short story "The Grizzly," a mother at a cocktail party gets so distracted by a story about a bear attacking a child that she doesn't notice that her own baby has gone missing.
Lesley Jenike's essay "Exit, Pursued by Bear" considers the role bears play in literature, popular culture, and the author's own life and thoughts.
Poet Janice N. Harrington writes of the descent of crows onto a neighbors' lawn, "The great northern flock came down in octaves and gangs/to bully branch and boundary and sleep."
In her poem "I Want to Eat Bugs with You Underground," Julie Danho writes of two people in love, "both of us/quiet as roses waiting for the bees to arrive."
The issue also includes an Aaron Hamburger short story about Trump-supporting Canadians, a JoAnna Novak essay on her addiction to frosting, a film essay about David Lynch almost writing the third installment of the Star Wars trilogy, a conversation about fiction between writer Olivia Clare and Bennington Review fiction editor and College faculty member Benjamin Anastas, short stories by Olivia Clare, Maria Kuznetsova, Dan Pope, and Terese Svobda; and poetry by Catherine Barnett, Miranda Field, Joanna Klink, Elizabeth Robinson, Maggie Smith, and Devon Walker-Figueroa '15, Rebecca Wolff, and Robert Wrigey, among others.