The Imaginary Jew
John Berryman
From The Kenyon Review, Autumn 1945, Vol. VII, No. 4 The second summer of the European War I spent in New York. I lived in a room just below street-level on Lexington above 34th, wrote a good deal, tried not…
Four Poems by Anna Journey
Anna Journey
Elegy Where I Initially Refuse to Eat Sand My mother liked to eat beach glass and sand people stepped in. Not many girls would forgive such a palate. I was willing to forgive her half moon- shaped cookies called Swedish…
On Peter Mountford’s A Young Man’s Guide to Late Capitalism
Alexander Yates
Mariner Books: New York, NY, 2011. 304 pages. $15.95. I am embarrassed to admit this, but when Peter Mountford’s debut novel, A Young Man’s Guide to Late Capitalism, arrived in my mailbox, I picked it up with a know-it-all smirk.…
“a severe but brilliant mother mosaic so go in”: On Alice Notley’s Reason and Other Women
Lindsay Turner
Chax Press: Tuscon, AZ, 2010. 191 pages. $21.00. Toward the end of Alice Notley’s Reason and Other Women, the “big bang poet” is pitted against the “personal experience poet.” Like many of the New York school writers with whom she…
Saint
Raisa Tolchinsky
Been waiting for this headless coachman to save me from the cold. I give myself over to pain that smells of papercranes that burn in flight. It’s a summer field with no place to run slow over water as you…
The Last Things We Said
Kevin McIlvoy
The last things we said to each other after hours of calling out, knocking walls, wild thumping around, pointless strategizing, no cell phone reception, laughing, loud chilled laughing, urinating so satisfying we called it The Rapture—lots of urinating against the…
Romance in a Time of Rockets
Gareth Lee
We suffered largesse, a bombardment citrus light and a taste of burned roses, sandalwood blooming in air pockets whereas from these pockets come two shocks of levity, eruptions sacrilegious: origami churches made of pages, ripped mass hymnals, serrations so much…
Sissy
John Kinsella
Where the great wandoo forests abut open farmland, there’s a sense of possibility that can corrupt as much as stimulate mystery. The edge-effect has implications that police and locals are all too conscious of. Casual dope-smokers get ideas into their…
A Review of Adam Levin’s The Instructions
Burke Hilsabeck
McSweeney’s: San Francisco, CA, 2010. 1030 pages. $29.00. The Instructions, Adam Levin’s first novel, invites estimations of size. It weighs three pounds. After choosing it for the book club of the website The Rumpus, Stephen Elliot described the book as…
On Michael Burkard’s Envelope of Night: Selected and Uncollected Poems, 1966-1990
Andy Frazee
Nightboat Books: Callicoon, NY, 2008. 382 pages. $19.95. In “Renaming My Face,” the preface to his Envelope of Night, Michael Burkard discusses the movement in his writing process from one of extensive rewriting to what we might call “first draft,…
Excerpts from A Hundred Thousand Hours
Rebecca Wadlinger
Translated from Norwegian by Rebecca Wadlinger • • I have my mother in my hands. It is she who holds my daughter through me. And my mother strokes my daughter across her back with my hands. And my mother kisses…
A Review of Charles Simic’s Master of Disguises
Lauren Goodwin Slaughter
Houghton Mifflin Harcourt: New York, NY, 2010. 96 pages. $22.00. Just as Dickinson warns that the truth must be told “slant” so as to not “dazzle” us “blind,” in his new collection Charles Simic suggests that we need disguises to…
Skin, Inc.: Identity Repair Poems by Thomas Sayers Ellis: This Book Is Not “Like” Anything You’ve Ever Read
Kascha Semonovitch
Graywolf Press: Minneapolis, MN, 2010. 112 pages. $23.00 So, you want to know what this book is “like”? What category it fits in? Well, you can go to hell. Or back to the library. Read this book on its own…
A Review of Adonis: Selected Poems
M. Lynx Qualey
Edited and translated by Khaled Mattawa. Yale University Press: New Haven, 2010. 399 pages. $30.00. It was 1988 when Adonis’s name was first connected with the Nobel Prize for Literature. In his 2006 memoir, Memories in Translation, pioneer Arabic-English translator…
The Animals are Undisturbed
Daniel Poppick
Snow distributes script if music Pastes its name to speech, all necking With its own inflections in the orchard. Winter Meanwhile strings its trinket to your joke before you Even shake the punchline Loose, regardless of your fleetest finger. Call…
Don’t I Know
Rose McLarney
A man who was not to be trusted once owned the hound. Don’t I know the kind. But I won’t walk the way the stray dog does, head down, side-stepping, skitter. He’s pulled taut, fear hauling against his troublesome tendency…
The Stations of the Sun
Reese Okyong Kwon
1. Another god, another artist According to Chinese mythology, the goddess Nugua formed the first mortals from yellow mud. An artist, she carefully sculpted each limb, pressed closed each fingertip, contoured each nose, creating individuals. But at some point she…
Eve
Leslie Harrison
If the angels came there would be no kindness they are after all also without mercy pity they are warriors soldiers of wing beak and sword griffins of the lord endlessly taking sides come unto all of this world to…
Pulled by the Hair: Deborah Digges and the Power of Myth
Joelle Biele
When news of Deborah Digges’ death reached me, the first image that came to mind was after a reading at Harvard. I want to say the building was on Plympton; the room had a high ceiling, and if I remember…
Scene 43, Take 1: Interior, Sushi Restaurant
Nicky Beer
after Park Chan-wook & Choi Min-sik The actor does his best to put death in his eyes. He holds the live, fist-sized octopus before his face and murmurs I am sorry I am sorry before the cameras roll. Action. He…
A Sort of Infinity
Matthew Baker
Christopher Surrey is at the kitchen table wearing a normal green T-shirt and normal blue jeans and normal white socks and just starting his homework for precalculus that’s due tomorrow when his aunt comes banging through their front door still…
The Brain Truck
Catherine Wing
He’s all magnet to my brain truck, polarized and pulled in a stark, strange-thoughted veer. Lacks ground and full with impulse. Queer about the eye, occipital. Never blinks but ringing. Loads the charge and smells of sulfur. He needs riddling…
The Architecture of the Place is Killing Me
Pat Smyklo
The house Matsunaga built among the Yaw trees I think of the house, the architect Matsunaga built for his sister with the Yaw trees. Architecture, he said should have many images just as there are a great variety of bird…
Two Brothers and Their Father, Under Indictment, Athens, May, 1989
Nick Papandreou
Two weeks ago a man set up a makeshift bed on the sidewalk outside our home. For a mattress he uses a pile of newspapers, for a pillow a cement sack, and the stars serve as his blanket. He has…
The Ludlum Identity
The premise is everything. Your opening scene? A man floating on the ocean. Of course: The origins of life. Vishnu sleeps on an ocean. It fits. Now have the man rescued, drawn up from the pre-existent state into existence. After…
Metamorphosis
Katherine Larson
It is astounding how little the ordinary person notices butterflies. —Nabokov We dredge the stream with soup strainers and separate dragonfly and damselfly nymphs— their eyes like inky bulbs, jaws snapping at the light as if the world was full…
What I Learned About Writing in Drama School, or Kissing in Drag
Atar Hadari
I am two inches from a girl I have wanted for pretty much two years, since she first walked into the acting class I’m taking. She is applying make-up to my face, specifically mascara, which I’ve no experience with, and…
Photographs of the Interiors of Dictators’ Houses
Albert Goldbarth
It’s as if every demon from hell with aspirations toward interior design flew overhead and indiscriminately spouted gouts of molten gold, that cooled down into swan-shape spigots, doorknobs, pen-and-inkwell sets. A chandelier the size of a planetarium dome is gold,…
The Composer’s Lover
Alex Dimitrov
We had an hour without music. A nerve brightly turning in a closed room of the mind— the heart’s black pool, a word that expired into the air and woke everything. Your bed slid under an invisible knife. What happened…
Incubator Baby World’s Fair, 1939
Meagan Ciesla
JuŻ? The father said when his wife went from lighting the Sabbath candle to hunching over the mattress, water trickling down her stockinged leg. Already? He was alarmed to see his wife in labor so soon—barely two months in America…
Some Say the Lark Makes Sweet Division
Jennifer Chang
I have a daughter, I say, here is my daughter, I say, and here is the poem where you and I intend a cool hour in the future. I break your heart: that is how a poem should begin, and…
Black Stones
Amy Bonnaffons
To whom can we turn in our need? Not angels, not humans. . . . —Rilke I. At midnight, Sarah awoke to find an angel hovering above her hospital bed like a hummingbird. Aside from his large white wings, he…
Difficult Simplicity: On James Longenbach’s The Iron Key
Jeremy Bass
W.W. Norton: New York, NY, 2010. 89 pages. $24.95 One might not expect poems of great abundance to speak quietly, but in James Longenbach’s The Iron Key, that is exactly what they do. A certain soft-spoken musicality characterizes much of…
