Bennington Review's ISSUE THREE: THREAT Reviewed by NewPages!
Jakub Geltner, “Cultural Landscape”
“Cultural Landscape,” the cover image by Jakub Geltner that kicks off Issue Three: Threat, is a special kind of eye-catcher. A slice of pizza hangs precariously over a table’s edge, its cheese replaced by grass, its toppings swapped for uprooted trees and tumbling cars caught up in some unfamiliar landslide, slipping toward an undefined kind of doom.
The mood set, Editor Michael Dumanis explains that the issue’s theme threat was chosen on November 10, 2016, two days after “a certain historical event.” He writes that, as a result of this sudden sense of dislocation and anxiety, the editors “gravitated toward poems and stories and essays where paradigms where [sic] similarly disrupted, where characters suddenly found themselves destabilized by external forces, where institutions and individuals in which we’d placed our trust failed to hold up their end of the bargain.”