American River Review

American River Review’s 2005 edition is a luxury version of college lit mags. Yes, it still has plenty of interesting—if occasionally self-conscious—work by talented undergraduates, but the design and production values are incredibly good. It’s a visually delightful magazine that bears up under scrutiny. A color center section does justice to the art; I was particularly taken by a pair of photographs by Davida Feder. Some of the shorter poems seem to get lost in the white space, but it benefits poems with longer lines, like Barbara Link’s “Like Any Other Couple They Try to Change Each Other”—in which “Paulie” Gauguin and “Vince” Van Gogh argue aesthetics. American River Review also contains the winners of the high-school writing contest conducted by ARC’s English department.