My wife was a member of Signa Tau Delta when she was a student at Birmingham-Southern College (R.I.P, 1918-2024) in the early 90s, and acquired this journal as part of her membership. I'm sure she read it when she got it, but then afterward it sat lonely and neglected on shelves and boxes for 31 years until I decided to pick it up and start reading it. It's always kind of neat to be the first person to review something, and likely I'll be the last, given I doubt anyone else outside an official Sigma Tau Delta archive of back issues will read it much less review it, so it is with the utmost feeling of importance and duty that I now review the journal.

It is divided into three sections: poetry, fiction and essays. The poetry, I'll review as a group. The selection that was curated is quite a depressing and impoverished lot. And now, individual short reviews: The Clothespin ends with a depressing cliffhanger. Pool Parlor in the A.M. gives a glimpse into the life of a man who plays pool just to have money. The Bags in just one short page covers a sad life of a war veteran. Traveling Salesman ends with a very disturbing comparison between a penis and a Holy Communion wafer. The Foreman explores a nightmare based on a memory of a miner in a collapsed mine. Invisible Indian breaks the trend at last, delivering a hopeful note at the end of a sad four stanzas of mistaken identity. And yes this was written before our modern-day sensibility to refer to Native Americans as such. Gabriel's Night is the most visual and confusing of the collection. Is it about a capital punishment execution? Or someone hallucinating over a lost love? Or both? I don't know. Given it quotes James Joyce's "The Dead" at the beginning gives a clue. Then finally Down to Dirt follows a boy and his dad as they gas gophers, and yes, there's a parallel to Dachau. Good grief! Not an uplifting collection in the least.

On to Fiction! The Yakima delivers a scene of visitors to a relative living in an old house on an "Indian" (again, it was the 90s!) Reservation. It focused on horses past and present. It was like someone saw a photograph and decided to describe the scene. No plot really, just, scenery.

The Ice House returns the journal to its depressing motif, with a married woman curled up and sleeping, and dreaming of days spent with her dad on an icy lake. Between dreams, she laments her present state of affairs, married, childless: "it was exactly the way it was supposed to be now. It just wasn't the way she'd thought it would be, then." She tries to drift off asleep at the end, just after comparing her daily ingest of presumably a birth control pill--or is it chemotherapy--with the children she would never have in the form of the egg her body flushes each month: "she imagined each one mourning its own loss, sending a final cry pulsing through her veins." The story ends with more dreams of her happy youth.

Lies delivers that surprise punchline at the end, which, given you'll never find a copy of this journal in the wild, you probably expect me to spoil for you, but alas, I will not. The main character is a stalker who finally confronts the man she has stalked, only to ask him the secret to his happiness that she observed from afar, only to get a harrowing answer.

And finally, The Hard Lesson, about a school official who laments not being able to help a boy learn, who tries to teach the boy but can't get through to him, only to find in the boy's eyes, at the end, something dark and sinister and... unteachable. [insert shiver here]

The Essays section seems odd to review, as it itself is a section of reviews. Unfortunately it doesn't give a breath of fresh air with its non-fiction! An Explication of Sylvia Plath's "Poppies in July" Ok, seriously? A journal of depressing poems and fiction pieces, and the first essay dissects a poem about suicide? Geez Louise, the early 1990s were messed up, if these were the best the members of ΣΤΔ, present and past, had to offer!

Dearer Than My Soul: Shakespeare's Daughters As Their Fathers' Keepers covers three plays, Titus Andronicus, Romeo and Juliet, and Hamlet. Two plays I'd read (the latter) and one I'd never heard of, but in all three, daughters and fathers wrestle with control, dominance and the inheritance of ideals. Dark stuff, to be sure.

Finally, the journal closes with a presumably autobiographical and literal walk down memory lane, with A Small Piece of Land, named after a plot of land the author's father purchased, so he could then build a house on it for his family to live on. Spoiler alert: the father never finishes the house, the parents get divorced, the author grows up, gets divorced, and finds her childhood half-home demolished, and not just an empty small piece of land in the middle of cut-out houses in a neighborhood.

I mean no offense to the authors, who clearly have a literary bent with their ability to craft stories, use consonance, and play with reader emotions and expectations. But I'm guessing the jury members, all university faculty, or authors, either had very little happy selections to work with, or they had a secret agenda to depress their journal's readers. (Or both.)

3 stars for the emotions the selections pulled out of me, and for the objectively well-written, if not almost complete depressing, content.