The new New Letters: Get it now

We know that the folks over at New Letters, the University of Missouri-Kansas City’s quarterly literary magazine, put out one of the best publications around, but with their current issue — their 75th anniversary edition — they seem to have outdone themselves.

I don’t know enough about the art form to speak on the poetry collected here, but the essays and short stories seem to have reached some sort of higher plane. Thomas Kennedy won New Letters a National Magazine Award last year for his essay “I Am Joe’s Prostate,” but I think this issue’s “Chasing Jack” is even better — it’s Kennedy as a young man, smitten by Kerouac, doing a pretty good job living out his own little version of On the Road. 

But what really slayed me was a short story by Olufunke Grace Bankole (editor Robert Stewart calls her a newer voice in fiction; her biographical note says she’s a first-generation American of Nigerian parentage, and a Harvard Law School grad who left law so she could write).

In Bankole’s “Slighted,” a girl and her sister awake to find their mother’s brand new VW Beetle covered in “brown, runny lumps.” The mother contemplates the mess:

Feces slid down from the hood, draping the windows and doors like a shaggy palm tree…

She looked toward the back of the flat, in the direction of the outhouse. “Hmpf. Of course.” She shook her head. “Where else would they get all of this shit?”….

The inside of the car, too, was full of it. When my mother opened the driver side door, the stink of weeks — maybe even years — old waste pushed into our nostrils.

The story proceeds to solve the mystery of who put the crap onto, and into, the new Beetle. I’ll sure as hell not spoil it — except to suggest that even though the circumstances might be way, way different, Bankole’s story lays bare every girl’s conflicted feelings about her mother.

Photos by Michael Sinclair — especially the cover art (“Fourth of July #2, Independence, Mo.”) — and Eli Reichman are pretty great, too. This is well worth the $8 (order it through the Web site). Nice work, New Letters.