Dream of Lust
Louise Glück
From The Kenyon Review, New Series, Winter 2001, Vol. XXIII, No. 1 After one of those nights, a day: the mind dutiful, waking, putting on its slippers, and the spirit restive, muttering I’d rather, I’d rather— Where did it come…
A Dream in Horses: Carl Phillips’s Double Shadow
Kascha Semonovitch
Farrar, Straus and Giroux: New York, NY, 2011. 80 pages. $23.00. In Double Shadow, Carl Phillips has a “dream / of horses. Two of them. Fitted with blinders.” The harness restricts the vision of the horses. Phillips records their perception, not…
On Poets on Teaching: A Sourcebook
Dan Rosenberg
Ed. Joshua Marie Wilkinson. University of Iowa Press: Iowa City, IA, 2010. 344 pages. $29.95. Most of us who teach poetry are just making it up as we go. We cobble together our syllabi from a hodgepodge of pedagogic elements…
The Protean Brain: Joanie Mackowski’s View From a Temporary Window
Christopher Robinson
Pitt Poetry Series. University of Pittsburgh Press: Pittsburgh, PA 2010. 72 pages. $14.95. Inspired by Ovid’s Metamorphoses, many poets recycle his imagery or cast his plots in contemporary language, but Joanie Mackowski isn’t interested in recycling. In View From a Temporary Window,…
Kepler’s Snowflake
Amit Majmudar
The Six-Cornered Snowflake. By Johannes Kepler (Author), Jacques Bromberg (Translator), and Guillermo Bleichmar (Foreword). Paul Dry Books: Philadelphia, PA, 2011. 115 pages. $12.00. Johannes Kepler (1571–1630) wrote some of the foundational works of modern astronomy. He was the first to…
On Kevin Goodan’s Winter Tenor
Kristen Evans
Alice James Books: Farmington, ME, 2009. 80 pages. $15.95. Kevin Goodan’s second book of poems, Winter Tenor, presents a series of evocative meditations on what it is to live close to the earth, with wonder and humility, amidst the violent practicalities…
On Alan Heathcock’s Volt
Marie-Helene Bertino
Graywolf Press: Minneapolis, MN, 2011. 208 pages. $15.00. The stories in Alan Heathcock’s debut collection are set in Krafton, a fictional, god-fearing town somewhere in the American West. The inhabitants of Krafton are hard workers, a surprising number of whom…
The Soldier on Routine
Katy Didden
We are living with the young Christ in the Green Zone. Even we who are not He suffer hands tugging our hems, though our minds select the bodies we see. Young Christ is dual, but what of Him is like…
Electric Chair
Mark Conway
Sirloin chugs toward my father’s heart as he hums out in the garden, seated on his easy chair, rods throb in the cataracts that guard his eyes; he sits on the massed electrons of this electric chair, an easy ride…
Rhymes with Poetess
Lesley Wheeler
A talented professor of ethnic American literatures had recently left my university, the Victorian Gothic enclave where I pursued a doctorate in the early nineties. Gossipers blamed her departure on a culture clash epitomized by her brightly-hued manicures. In the…
Whole Life
Vojislav Pejović
It was the time before the tourists and the yachts, before there was tap water and asphalt road. The power wasn’t on every day, either. In those days, the night would descend upon us unhindered, through the crowns of zelenika…
Reunion
Kelly Luce
Just imagine: a place where everything you’ve ever lost is for sale. I came upon it by accident. Over the course of that interminable weekend after Jun died, Asian lady beetles overtook the place in shadowy Totsuka-cho. Orange, winged bodies…
Use Everything in Your Arsenal
Kelly Fordon
All of the neighborhood kids were converged in our backyard playing shark attack when we heard a whooping Gladiator cry. “Yah! Yah! Yah!” We couldn’t see who was screaming, but we heard the smack of fast feet on the sidewalk.…
The Chainsaw Soiree
Nickolas Butler
They squatted in an abandoned Pentecostal church high on the bluffs over a river and when the rain or snow was heavy the roof leaked and the church was loud with the dripping of water in metal buckets and when…
This Crisis Brought to You by Me
Jennifer Bannan
This was during the time I was selling the hurricane sponsorships. My job, like my love life, was all about disasters, natural and unnatural. With the churning of the season’s third storm in the Atlantic, I had ClearChannel, Citigroup and…
Hope is the thing with
Martha Silano
an important message, a pressing urgency I reckon Hope’s entitled to. Hope says Hello, my dear, and it goes from there: how are you, hope you’re well, bit hot over here in Burkina Faso, then Hope’s done with asking after…
Beauty Spot
Will Schutt
Those hills, maybe, at the bookends of summer. Green bench in a shade, the Georgica jetty, magnificent ocean rocks we hiked between. California wildflowers. Some views of Grenoble going up the St. Hillaire du Touvet funicular coupled with the knowledge…
A Vocation
Siobhan Phillips
A human can be so afraid the liver fails, a guest researcher tells me. I’m impressed. His accent tests a laugh-line: You are yellow, truly. Yes. . . . We don’t know why it happens yet, but give us time.…
Ode to the Workshop Poem
Maureen Morehead
little blue shoes like birds in a mulberry. big big alligator your face on a billboard. but the biggest alligator is older than glaciers, than little blue shoes far far from Louisville. far from the boy who smells like old…
Anniversary at the Evening Café
Susanna J. Mishler
Cups of coffee steamed in our hands. The courtyard purpled under vines. On her index finger, suddenly, an emerald mayfly—wings veined, abdomen swooped up. Mayflies live one day and expire. They flicked through my dreams last night. Under an olive…
The Art of Heaven
Rodney Jones
In the middle of my life I came to a dark wood, the smell of barbecue, kids running in the yards. Not deep depression. The nice Hell of suburbs. Speed bumps. The way things aren’t quite paradise. Nights I read…
A Lightenment On New Year’s Eve
Alice Fulton
Season of no weedwhackers and wind that moans like a folding choir. Tonight the old is laid away in smoke. Tonight the sodality of fire. Newness is intensely memorable. It’s called the primacy effect. The rinpoche of firstness is ready…
Anatomy
Elizabeth Wade
You were not there in biology class on the day we learned pithing, on the day the teacher demonstrated how to slide an instrument into the base of a frog’s skull, how to sever the brain from the spinal cord,…
Life Story
Joseph Scapellato
A man lives with a woman he loves enough to live with, but not enough to marry and not enough for kids. He knows he could love others enough to marry, enough for kids, but he’s not the kind of…
On Lindsay Hunter’s Daddy’s
Aimee Pokwatka
Featherproof Books: Chicago, IL, 2010. 340 pages. $14.95. In Daddy’s, Lindsay Hunter’s debut collection of microfiction, there is a story about a woman who uses her dog’s shock collar to achieve sexual pleasure so intense it borders on enlightenment. There…
A Dictionary of Preserving the Hydrangea’s Bloom
Jennifer Militello
First, soften its one thousand grand catastrophes of smoke, small-fisted exotics, unaware of death. Startle the petals’ parchment paper, all in grays beneath the flesh, scents that have been pinched and rounded, planted down the hurricane loam, equal parts peat,…
Belfast
Maureen McLane
Your velvet hills came to me last night in the pool how they hugged the fraught city the pubs filled and buzzing the Europa unbombed now for years. Your political murals are kitsch and history’s a ditch for lying if…
The Dog-Killer of Khartoum
Jennifer MacKenzie
And so the figure of the dog-killer of Khartoum enters the conversation. With a checkered scarf wrapped around his head and carrying a shotgun, he appears unannounced on the embassy steps at noon. The American Embassy—it is embassy men who…
Andalusian Wind
Sharon Dolin
Wind that roughens up the palms and the cypresses and the Esparto grass. And me. • • The only still thing: roadside cactus. And the one gray mare that stands all day in the field. Until she catches me watching…
Incredulity of Thomas
Darin Ciccotelli
Don’t hamper me with close inspection, the silt and shallow water in your eyes. Your eyes, the movement of beetles. Obsess on hay. Place on me your solitary, blind hands— console no one. I am the ghost visage of a…
On Lisa Robertson’s R’s Boat
Hannah Brooks-Motl
University of California Press: Berkeley, CA, 2010. 96 pages. $19.95. Over eight books and dozens of chapbooks, as well as pamphlets, reissues, and collaborations, Lisa Robertson has quietly but surely emerged as one of our most exciting and prolific philosophers—I…
Marilyn Monroe’s Feet
Marcia Aldrich
“She was thinking that, after all, feet are the most important part of the whole person; women, she said to herself, have been loved for their feet alone.” —Virginia Woolf, “Street Haunting” I’ve taken some posters of classic movie stars…
Echoes
Kristen Cosby
And then there is the voice of the sand itself—the quick sharp sibilance of a gust of sand blown over a dune created by a sudden shift of the breeze, the all but silent sound of the never ending restless…
The Lamp at the Turning
E. Lily Yu
For ten years the streetlamp on the corner of Cooyong and Boolee kept vigil with the other lamps along the road. They were surrogate moons for an age when the moon itself was too distant and dim to guide travelers…
