Cry of the Occasion
Jake Adam York
–John Earl Reese, shot while dancing in a café in Mayflower,Texas, October 22, 1955 so loud it fills the valleys of even the fingers smeared into a kind of quiet, the everything you can’t hear but hear through the music…
The Diseased Language of Mo Yan
Anna Sun
“It has often happened in history that a lofty ideal has degenerated into crude materialism. Thus Greece gave way to Rome, and the Russian Enlightenment has become the Russian Revolution. There is a great difference between the two periods. Blok…
September 7, 2001; To Ottla on the Subject of Our Ablation
Carol Ann Davis
September 7, 2001
By then what had we already
given away? What was still ours?
Be realistic—at this hour ten years ago
you were still alive, but barely:
…
Time Capsule
Shavonne Clarke
We buried the capsule in the backyard, a few inches under the ground. We were thirteen, an age that shivers indeterminate: you know nothing or you know everything. …
The Bloodpeople in the Language
Thomas Glave
And even now being in Jamaica and writing this and knowing that I am writing these words thinking about death and the end of all things and the loss of everything—for loss has indeed recently come very near; has knocked, made itself felt, known, present.…
Questions of Citizenship: Alice Notley’s Songs and Stories of the Ghouls
Jenny Johnson
In her recent essay, “Create Dangerously: The Immigrant Artist at Work,” Edwidge Danticat questions borders between space, time, and literature. …
How to Know the Unbearable
Karen Malpede
The governor of New York, Andrew Cuomo, saw it happen. The Hudson River met the East River in the middle of downtown Manhattan. Water roared down the streets, rushed into tunnels, and filled the World Trade Center construction site. A…
Margin, Error; Wanted
Elizabeth Lindsey Rogers
Margin, Error
Vincenzo Galilei (1520-1591), lutenist, composer, music theorist, and father of Galileo Galilei
The numbers always failed
when forced with heaven’s
weight: absolute, holy—
…
The Golem of Zukow
Helen Maryles Shankman
The Mirsky mill nested at the fork of the Bug and Wlodawa rivers, near the liquid and ever-changing border with the Ukraine. At the hub of a cultivated patchwork of plowed fields, the plain stone structure could be observed for…
Art of Losing: On Raptus by Joanna Klink
Rachel Richardson
Joanna Klink’s Raptus begins with an epigraph from Charles Olson that reads like a preemptive admonishment: “Love the World—and stay inside it.” Yet, from the first lines, Klink’s speaker is practicing letting go. …
Confidence Men: Christopher Narozny’s Jonah Man
Theodore Wheeler
Christopher Narozny’s tantalizing debut novel, a literary thriller surrounding the intrigue of 1920s vaudevillians, is told from the perspective of four men connected by talent, ambition, and a grisly murder in a lawless New Mexico town.…
Mr. Edwards and the Spider
Robert Lowell
From The Kenyon Review, Winter 1946, Vol. VIII, No. 1 I saw the spiders marching through the air, Swimming from tree to tree that mildewed day In latter August when the hay Came creaking to the barn. But where The…
Libya’s Day of Liberation: One Year On
Khaled Mattawa
Tripoli, Oct. 24, 2012: A dispatch from the poet and translator Khaled Mattawa one year after the liberation of Libya. Yesterday was the anniversary of the collapse of the Qaddafi regime. He was caught and killed on October 20th of…
H^e Sapa
Layli Long Soldier
One.
H^e Sapa is a horn is a mountain, is a black horn or black mountain, as it is the same in this language. Remember. And is not a black hill, not Paha Sapa, by any name you call it.
…
The Woman You Don’t Expect
Elizabeth Kate Switaj
The woman you don’t expect to leave your door unlocked, because no one but you and the leasing agent had the key, wears tall, slender heels. If they were Crocs or shredded boots discarded by the door, you wouldn’t see how her untucked blouse fluttered with her breath or how her body (tall, slender) curled itself into native indentations on the couch.…
Self-Machinationi & Motesii: an Essay on Attempt
Julia Cohen
i This word was found on the web of flesh between thumb & pointer. On the day our stranger broke the kite in a park waxing with leashless dogs, strollers, bubble pipes. No words met me in the grass. Your word knelt under the bed of the left hand. Your word stood up & shook its mane like splinters from an exploding coffin.
…
Geography and One’s Own Room: Adania Shibli’s We Are All Equally Far from Love
M. Lynx Qualey
The most wonderful thing about Adania Shibli’s We Are All Equally Far from Love is the author’s sometimes loving, sometimes angry attention to detail. This attention was also the force behind her first book, Touch, longlisted for the Best Translated Book Award in 2010.…
Silent Dragon
Rafael Acevedo
Translated from Spanish by Erica Mena
in Borges, in origami
Unfortunately
the last dragon travels the streets of Tokyo
trailing a wake of escaped paper,
thinking about the future of the yen.…
Over the Peace Line
Amanda Aszman
On the eleventh night of July I stuff my swollen feet into a pink pair of welly boots and open the door to a city that’ll soon catch fire. The wee boys and girls of Belfast had their fun earlier…
A Conversation with Anna Journey: Q & A with Davis McCombs’s Graduate Poetry Course
Anna Journey
This collaborative interview with the poet Anna Journey took place during the seminar, “Contemporary First Books of Poetry,” a graduate course for students in the MFA program at the University of Arkansas, taught by Davis McCombs. For the course, the…
Uncommon Vision: Melanie Rae Thon’s In This Light: New and Selected Stories
Patrick Dacey
It may seem strange for a writer to release a volume of collected stories after having published only two previous collections, but each of the stories included in Melanie Rae Thon’s In This Light: New and Selected Stories is so meticulously crafted that it’s easy to see how she could take over two decades to produce the kind of work we find here.…
The Savant of Sunflowers,
The Apprentice of Roses
Diane Ackerman
Something in a rose
knows to spread its roots
into a stable base,
how to shimmy up a trellis,
graft onto reliable stock,
open up rich with scent,
and slowly unfold another
flush of tawny bloom.
…
On Manoleria
by Daniel Khalastchi
Andrew McFadyen-Ketchum
Daniel Khalastchi’s debut collection of poetry, Manoleria (winner of the 2011 Tupelo Press/Crazyhorse First Book Award), was written over the winter of 2006-2007 at the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown. Finding their genesis in NPR’s Marketplace, the hour-long financial news report, Manoleria investigates the toll that political, social, and economic unrest in the U.S. and abroad has on its citizenry.…
Undertaking
Anne Germanacos
A full self requires stillness.
I am coming upon the face, the shape of it.
• •
Scratched pots and pans, wooden mallets hard enough to beat in a head. Sieves, bowls, scissors, tongs. Ladles.
Have we humiliated the house of our mother?
…
Small Bang Theory
Anne Shaw
for Glen
He says, You don’t need a religion. Woman,
you are a religion, and describes how the hints of things impinge
pushing their shapes before them as they rise
…
The Idea of Home as a Haunt
Adam Clay
Reconsidering or considering companionship seems
too studious or perhaps
even too stubborn
for someone
as careful as yourself.
…
Diorama of a Funeral; Diorama of a Tiny Death
Rochelle Hurt
Diorama of a Funeral
I pour a salt solution into the shoebox, enough
to float the whole chrysanthemum rigmarole—
rubber bouncy balls: my aunts like buoys
in a sea of black felt, draped like mourning
…
Remedy
Hannah Pass
She said, “Drink it,” and I asked, “What is it?”
Karen was holding a glass stein, her mother’s German crest peeking out just below her pinky. “A remedy,” she said. “Just drink.” We were sailing on our honeymoon and I was feeling a bit seasick.
…
Hurtling Along: on Ennui Prophet by Christopher Kennedy
Lauren Goodwin Slaughter
America has been bedazzled to death. According to the knee-buckling prose poems in Ennui Prophet, Christopher Kennedy’s fourth collection, grocery stores, chain bookstores, all-terrain vehicles and other symbols of Western excess have embellished the landscape and also our selfhood in the most boring, indulgent ways. Our connections with each other, the world, and ourselves are in danger.…
Evening Blueness in the West: Gerald Duff’s Blue Sabine
Vanessa Blakeslee
Blue Sabine is the seventh novel by Gerald Duff, known for his vivid depictions of Deep East Texas in his numerous works, most recently the memoir Home Truths: A Deep East Texas Memory.…
Nursing Home; Embodiment
Christopher Phelps
Nursing Home
Oh, the echoes
Lalia our endpoints
Know, babies and
The demented
…
Cloud Country
James Merrill
How like a marriage is the season of clouds.
The winds at night are festive and constellations
Like stars in a kaleidoscope dissolve
And meet in astounding images of order.
…
