Prose, Poetry, and Art since 1956
/ˈɑːf.tər/ Preposition Alice met her father for the first time after her school recital. Her hands were so sweaty they slipped on the keys a couple of times and despite the encouragement from the audience, she knew she’d botched it. Her mother was waiting behind the scenes, flanked by a tall, lanky man. Years later, supine on the white leather sofa of a Freudian analyst,…
Our sixty-fifth year of publishing, and our second year of Portland Review’s online-only format began with the usual questions — where would we be taking the Review this year? Or, more interestingly, where might our authors take us? To answer these questions, we posed one of our own: Truth, or Dare? We received the truth of a compartmentalized self in Ana Maria Caballero’s “Room”; of…
There is a term in visual art called chiaroscuro, which, in Italian, can translate to a compound phrase: lightdark. In this year’s series for Portland Review, two of the oldest artistic tropes— shadow and light—meet another profoundly finicky duality: work and play. You can’t have one without the other. Or can you? Everyday, some work at dawn, some the graveyard shift; kids play at recess…
In the spring of 1983, Russian choreographer George Balanchine, at the age of seventy-nine, lay dying of a rare neurological disorder in Roosevelt Hospital. According to his biography by Bernard Taper, dancers from the New York City Ballet, the company Balanchine founded and spent a lifetime nurturing, came by to visit in dribs and drabs, for he had been there for many months. Not only…
Her first harmonica was a cheap Toysmith—plastic under silver paint—that ’er daddy picked up on ’is way home from work without thinkin’ the littlest bit about it. It was a toy, was all. So was ’er first guitar: an ugly purple thing with a princess on it that hadn’t been the full-size, beat-to-hell beauty she’d dreamed of after seein’ an old Willie Nelson concert on…