Readers, as you will note, once more I have this month vacated my space in this note so that we might continue to offer a new element, instead: the authors of the poems (or translations, or both) speaking of their
Featured Selection
I’ve been back in my home state of West Virginia for a couple of years now. One friend tells me that she can hear me “slip back into my drawl” when I talk to my dog, Sarge. At a
Reviews
In this month’s installment, reviews editor Adam Tavel briefly examines a poignant first book about family, identity, and nature’s majesty. Light into Bodies by Nancy Chen Long University of Tampa Press $14, 108 pages
Essays and Comment
Angels on Second Avenue: The Lower East Side When Poetry Was the World At the start of the 1960s, the Lower East Side transformed itself—from a Jewish ghetto that was still peopled with immigrants from Russia and Eastern Europe—into
This Month's Selections
It was her voice that made the sky acutest at its vanishing. “The Idea of Order at Key West”. I learned it in art class, second grade, how to make my crayon portraits of our house, posted by Mother
If I wake at 3, ephemerality Is leitmotif. Small wonder in that, of course: Tempus fugit. The years go hurtling by. Like any other bromides, these became What they are for their truth. It’s only a vapor, Say, that version
Some Propositions with Children The child is completely immersed in childhood the child doesn’t know what to do with childhood the child coincides with childhood the child lets childhood invade him like sleep his head falls and he’s adrift
i. Five years of nothing. Then, one night she calls and tells: she followed him, and “sure enough he visited my so-called friend, Charise.” I have my own failed marriage story. She’s heard. But she’s not calling to commiserate.
LONG AFTER HE IS GONE All the summer’s night I dream I am awake reading, following sentences that follow a woman who finds her husband by following his footsteps in snow. She needs to forgive him, to be forgiven.
My mother & the other ladies lie prone in plastic yellow and green lounge chairs on our front lawn. Tin foil reflectors emanate from their necks like limbs. Baby oil–smeared on their faces and arms. They glow, glow, glow in
A jostle of stars at the edge of the Crab Nebula pinpoints the heart of Taurus. Under the right conditions, with a steady hand, you can see it with binoculars. As with most things, the conditions are rarely right, the
“The face of the Buddha’s so smooth,” she whispered, running her hands over the garden statue, “except for these little indentations here and there where the stone’s been chipped.” That was her way with almost everything: first look, then close
FAMILY BATTLES 1. Christmas 1964 My uncle stares at the TV throughout Our midday feast, erupts with “Fucking Krauts” Three times, which I’ll repeat on the way home And be spanked, my Barbie taken from me. We didn’t often
The racket of birdsong wakes me at 4am, before first light. “Music in the Morning” on WGBH regularly opened with five minutes of recorded birdsong, beginning with one or two birds, then growing to a chorus of warbles, cries,
—a white creamy substance found inside limestone caves. Being soft, cave milk was frequently the medium for finger fluting, a form of prehistoric art. How can it be Tomaz? How is it We find ourselves within this landscape Of
Wrath You had always expected a sonnet from me You’d laugh if I would talk about pantoums Who cares what you think about this poem You weren’t there to raise my first child were you You’d laugh if I