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The Gettysburg Review. For some time now, Peter Stitt, TGR’s editor, has been serializing what amounts to his book-length essay, “The Kingdom of Moroni.” It seems to appear every other issue or so. Mercifully, the current issue, Winter 2005, is without an installment of this essay which some might consider a waste of magazine space (although I have to admit, I enjoyed parts of the Autumn 2005 installment that dealt with his visit to Charlotte to teach in the low-residency MFA program from which I graduated). Apart from that, it is a fine publication and in my recent post about Rebecca McClanahan I linked to an essay of hers (Back) that is still up on the website, dealing with her bout with cancer. There is a cancer essay in the current issue, also, one that is just as powerful: “North Pole, South Pole, the Sea of Carcinoma” by Dev Hathaway, who died last year before the essay was published. (“Say everyone gets cancer, no matter who. It’s our be-all and end-all, birthright and deathright, our sign, our rock. Say cancer or another, eqully final. Say it straight up, Death is our gift. That without which we’d be selfish, slothful, and probably worse. Add the poet’s corollary: Beauty, as we know it, would go unborn.”) Unfortunately, that amazing essay is not online but an earlier story in TGR by Hathaway is. Check out Bashi Ja-Lut by Dev Hathaway.