Companion Species (II)
Kascha Semonovitch
I thought this was a loneliness that would subside. I thought it was a curtain That might divide: seeking a partition, or a drawstring, I pressed into the fold, pawed at velveteen. But there was no center, no division, just…
Review of Sarah Manguso’s The Two Kinds of Decay: A Memoir
Daniel Torday
Farrar, Straus and Giroux, $22.00 (hardcover) The novelist Richard Yates, discussing his masterpiece Revolutionary Road, once told an interviewer that the success of his writing depended upon his “avoiding the terrible traps that lie in the path” of autobiographical writing-”self-pity…
Review of Aravind Adiga’s The White Tiger
Wendy Singer
Free Press, $24.00 (hardcover) Aravind Adiga’s The White Tiger has won the Man-Booker prize. It is the fourth winner by an Indian writer, including Midnight’s Children, by Salman Rushdie, The God of Small Things, by Arundhati Roy, and Inheritance of…
The Bearberry Elegies
Nick Ripatrazone
Old lobster traps piled in the backyard near the bearberry. Mold had marked the wood blue-green, the color of bay tide at dusk. After a rainstorm I would lay with my mouth open and wait for droplets to fall from…
Afterbirth
Megan Mayhew Bergman
Like loons we travel underwater great distances, to surface next to each other . . . No matter where you are or who you’re near, we come up for air together. — Anne Michaels, “Sublimation,” Miner’s Pond She took off…
I Met Loss the Other Day 
Cara Blue Adams
I met Loss the other day. I took his measurements. My yellow tape looped around my arm, pins held tight between my pursed lips, I circled him. I measured his thin wrists, his frail neck, his elegantly sloped shoulders. Inseam,…
Almost Tenderly; Conquest; Tell Me a Story; Next Stop, Arcadia; The Life You Save
Carl Phillips
Almost Tenderly It had the heft of old armor—like a breastplate of bronze; like a shield, on hinges. It swung apart like a door. Inside it, the sea was visible—the sea and, on the shore, a man: stripped; beaten. Very…
That Map
of Bone and Opened Valves
Ilya Kaminsky
That was the summer we damned only the earth. That was the summer strange helicopters circled. We examined each other’s ears, we spoke with our hands in the air— It is the air. Something in the air wants us too…
Review of John Rybicki’s We Bed Down into Water
Elaine Bleakney
Triquarterly, $13.95 (paperback) The title of John Rybicki’s third collection of poetry, We Bed Down into Water, partly deceives. These poems will not cool or be cooled. The collection boils around Julie, Rybicki’s wife, suffering from cancer. From the bone…
Conversation with the Night Woman
Inga Abele
Translated by Inara Cedrins I am the boat with lifted oars, which the swarthy night woman slowly releases into the stream toward morning. On the oar paddles pulse bluish stars. This boat is tightly nailed, no leaks, no dents, no…
Review of Marjorie Garber’s Patronizing the Arts
Joseph Campana
Princeton University Press, $24.95 (hardcover) If one of the great paradoxes of art is that creation incites destruction, perhaps no period of cultural making proved that point more clearly than the Renaissance, an age in which the making and breaking…
