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Copy/paste the text below into your blog. <a href="http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/3252163.Alaska_Quarterly_Review_Vol_25_No_1_2?utm_medium=api&amp;utm_source=blog_review" style="float: left; padding-right: 20px"><img alt="Alaska Quarterly Review Vol. 25 No. 1 &amp; 2" border="0" src="http://s3.amazonaws.com/photo.goodreads.com/books/1209475072m/3252163.jpg" /></a> <a href="http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/3252163.Alaska_Quarterly_Review_Vol_25_No_1_2?utm_medium=api&utm_source=blog_review">Alaska Quarterly Review Vol. 25 No. 1 & 2</a> by <a href="http://www.goodreads.com/author/show/9530.Various">Various</a><br/><br/> <a href="http://www.goodreads.com/review/show/21299261?utm_medium=api&utm_source=blog_review"><h3>My review</h3></a> rating: 3 of 5 stars<br/>I have to admit my interest in this was mainly, "ALASKA has a literary journal?!," but once I got past my initial condescension this turned out to be a pretty decent selection of writing (though when you're publishing twice a year it may be time to stop referring to yourself as "quarterly"). Fully half the issue is poetry, which I traditionally have never liked and, with the exception of a few stand-outs, there wasn't much in this section, guest edited by Jane Hirshfield, to change my mind. As usual, <br/> <br/>most of the poetry just <br/>seemed like short stories that <br/>were chopped up and made a bit <br/>more obtuse <br/>than they normally would <br/>be <br/> <br/>which has never particularly appealed to my own sensibilities. The fiction was uniformly pretty good, though I thought it was strange to have two stories (Celeste Ng's "B&B" and Michael Hawley's "Diptych") to have homosexuality as central themes; normally a repetition in motifs wouldn't be that noteworthy except, as another reviewer noted, we also get two separate pieces dealing with terminal illness, Deborah Lott's essay "Looking For an Angle" and Leigh Morgan Owen's "The Tricky Thing About Endings," which contains this particularly good passage: <br/> <br/><i>That's the tricky thing about endings. Even if you know that all things end, it doesn't mean you know </i>when<i> something has. It's not until you stop thinking the echoes are the voices. Sometimes you just look back and think, "Oh. That ended."</i> <br/> <br/>The other stories and essays revolve around prison rodeos, Vermont inns, and parachuting schools, so it's a pretty eclectic selection of prose pieces. <br/> <br/>Despite my disinterest in the poetry, this was a solid issue, and I'll probably pick up the next one should I see it at the bookstore. <br/><br/><a href="http://www.goodreads.com/review/list/347733?utm_medium=api&utm_source=blog_review">View all my reviews.</a>