After the Uprising
Shane McCrae
Well some of us escaped
into the swamp and some of us
Snuck back quick to our masters and our masters knew
who stayed and who…
Goodbye to the Small Man
Melanie Nead
Of the bus ride south there’s not much to say except that it was long and very beautiful and they did not sit together. The bus was wood-paneled inside with many windows, and the young couple were the only passengers. …
A Pictorial Review of I Take Back the Sponge Cake
Darcie Dennigan and Carl Dimitri
I Take Back the Sponge Cake is a playful choose-your-own adventure book that combines poetry and mixed-media drawings. Loren Erdrich’s images came first and, for the most part, Sierra Nelson’s poems grew up around them.…
To Open Up Another Person’s Body: C. Dale Young’s Torn
Dilruba Ahmed
C. Dale Young’s latest book of poems, Torn, strikes me as haunted: the speakers are preoccupied with human frailty, strength, and lust; with a complex and contradictory relationship with God; and with violence in forms small and large.…
Thus Spoke Che Nawwarah: Interview with a Revolutionary
Youssef Rakha
I became obsessed with sodomizing Sheikh Arif round about the time his posters started crawling all over the streets. Today is July 20, 2012, right? A little over a year and a half after we toppled our president-for-life, Hosny Mubarak.…
Hurricane Irene Fingers My Hair
Claudia Cortese
The night is light-webbed, silver-ribbed—all spearmint-
scented ghost fuzz, all dancing the dance of end days,
of the Kingdom of What Is Not: a black so black it neons,
a green so green it furs our skin like leaves, like wolves.…
A Typeface for Senior Citizens
Hilary Leichter
Say that you built it with your bare hands and you’ll win their hearts. Don’t bother with words like font or computer. Present your audience with enlarged charts of glyphs and diacritics and digits, an elaborate eye exam.…
“The composition is different, that is certain”
—Ophelia Composing Herself
Ella Finer
A paper first delivered at Shakespeare and the Senses International Conference, as part of P.A. Skantze’s “Auratic Persona – Sonic Characters” Panel, Shakespeare’s Globe, London. 5 November 2011. Thinking about Ophelia and her own acts of vocal composition within Hamlet,…
Heart of the Matter: Myfanwy Collins’ Echolocation
Vanessa Blakeslee
In his 1950 Nobel Prize acceptance speech, William Faulkner stated that what writers most needed to remember was “the problems of the human heart in conflict with itself which alone can make good writing because only that is worth writing about, worth the agony and the sweat.” …
The Myth of W-a-t-e-r; In Which She Puts to Rest the Mirror; Encounter in Montgomery, 1918
Jeanie Thompson
The Myth of W-a-t-e-r
It was not a single word and there was no utterance.
You may have your play, your frozen moment in time
if these please you.
…
The Invisible Chassidishe Maidel (The Invisible Chassidic Girl)
Shula Rosen
Shmuel Pearlmutter had never looked at a woman. Yes, he had a vague recollection of what his mother looked like, since he had caught a definite glance at her stooped dotage two days earlier when she fed him soup at her apartment. But an actual woman, aside from his mother, was as familiar a sight to the Jerusalem-born chossid as the Grand Canyon.…
“This Baggy Monster”: Gretchen E. Henderson’s Galerie de Difformité
John Brown Spiers
The back cover of Gretchen E. Henderson’s Galerie de Difformité promises a work with “the head of a novel and the body of a poem.” In fact, Galerie is a literary art collage, employing image almost as often as it does language, and a ruination, its words first erased, then laid atop themselves, highlighted, obscured by photographs and further ruined text.…
“Begin What You Are”: On Henri Cole’s Touch
Adam Eaglin
Though Henri Cole’s recent work is haunted by nostalgia—and by the poet’s anxiety about nostalgia—his latest collection, Touch, concludes with the desire for new beginnings. …
Snow
Derek Walcott
Against thin woods, Siberian snow
steadily erases objects from their names,
like weevils in flour rocks crawl under the elms.
There is a place whose year is February. …
Two Versions of a Ghazal from Ghalib
M. Shahid Alam
I
You say I cannot have it if you find my heart.
It was once mine: now I know who has it.
…
Belly of the Whale
Hannah Withers
He slipped into the museum gift shop on the way into the office that day. He’d decided to buy her one of the African bracelets as a little gift. A better bouquet.…
The Ghost Writes Back
Amy Boesky
There was nothing surprising about my professor’s lecture on Shakespeare until, out of the blue, she started talking about ghostwriting. I was in the back of the packed auditorium with the other teaching assistants. Taking notes, working fast to revise…
Crazy Badland of the Tongue: Cyrus Console’s The Odicy
John Steen
If, in a moment of indignant weakness, you’ve ever asked why bad things happen to good people, you’ve reckoned with theodicy. Cyrus Console’s new book of poems takes its title from this theological term for philosophical defenses of God’s goodness in the light of the existence of evil. …
Country Ways
Maggie Schwed
If she be not nimble, she that holdeth a bucket will be trod upon by the sow.
Whoso eateth banana shall be set upon by the angry hive for the scent is signal.
…
How Things Might Have Gone and Other Wasted Thoughts
Janelle Garcia
Daughter:
My mother could have stayed, her feet hugging gravel and earth instead of slicing through sand and water in her rush to escape.…
In the (Parents’) Basement: Leigh Stein’s The Fallback Plan
Jessica Freeman-Slade
Here’s my prediction for future publishing seasons: one of the fruits of the recession will be a slew of narratives on arrested development.…
Strength, Sweetness, and More: The Available World by Ander Monson
Ben Purkert
True to its name, The Available World is vast in scope. To enter this compendium is to lunge into “all our collected layers”: a space littered with dropped candied hearts, disposable cameras, and “bodies / sprawled out like petals at a wedding.”…
Blowout
Rebecca Dunham
up on the main deck I seen mud
shooting all the way up to the derrick gas
& smoke filled so loud like taking an air
hose & sticking it in your ear starboard
…
Chauncy Street
Brian Doyle
Many years ago, when I was in my twenties, I worked for a small and obscure newspaper on Chauncy Street in Boston. The newspaper office was also small and obscure, as was Chauncy Street itself, which began forthrightly enough at…
Great Meadows Gallery
Tom Hart
Fairly recently retired, I find myself asked the standard questions: So what do you do with your time now that you’ve got so much of it? What explorations, what fresh directions do you find yourself taking now in this new flowering of the retired life? The sad essence, coming from non-retirees, is more or less this: how do you justify your existence?…
What the Tapeworm Wants: Aleš Šteger’s The Book of Things
Dan Rosenberg
Aleš Šteger’s The Book of Things, winner of Three Percent’s 2011 Best Translated Book Award, opens with a proem on the most abstract “thing” in the book: “A” begins, “A died. And didn’t die. Like his father / A, like his grandfather he drowned in the village graveyard.”…
Sleeping Out
Cassie Gonzales
The Tunisian sky at night was the deepest black he had ever seen—the stars pulsed like living things, and he wanted to run his fingers through them. How strange it was to travel so far from home just to find the same Michigan stars, he thought.…
Winter Clothes
Andrea Dulanto
We wore our winter clothes.
“I don’t want to talk about it,” said Valerie.
We were riding on the bus. …
Home
Madiha Sattar
Mostly he shrieked endlessly in the sticky Karachi heat or when a bomb went off, and in those moments Zainab fantasized about dangling him up by his tiny pink feet, still soft and wrinkly at age three, and smashing his brains out against the garden wall or suffocating him with a pillow.…
Ginsberg; Schopenhauer; Whitman
Bruce Bond
Ginsberg
Moloch whose eyes are a thousand blind windows.
Pity the man who spits on the mirror
to make it shine. I am talking to you,
world, the face I gave you a monster,
my shame a little circle I plunged into.
…
Advent Santa
Scott Garson
On the Wednesday before my kid’s holiday break, school let out two hours early. I wasn’t able to pick him up; I’d gotten some temp work that week. So I called my ex-girlfriend, Anne. Ben liked her a lot. When…
Watermark and Fable: On Eduardo C. Corral’s Slow Lightning
Anna Journey
“I’m / performing / an autopsy on my shadow,” writes Eduardo C. Corral in “Self-Portrait with Tumbling and Lasso.” Elliptically narrative, imagistic, musical, and fabular, the poems in Corral’s debut poetry collection, Slow Lightning, explore the shadowy borderlands of both gay and Chicano identity while adapting and altering aspects of magical realism.…
Shirking the Genre Ghetto: On Lev Grossman’s The Magician King and the Fantastical Novel in 2012
Alexander Yates
Last fall, Lev Grossman released The Magician King, the follow-up to his 2009 bestseller, The Magicians, and the second book in a planned trilogy. Like its predecessor, which was variously called “Harry Potter for adults” and “Harry Potter with sex and drugs”, The Magician King follows Quentin Coldwater and his friends on their adventures through an imagined world called “Fillory,” as well as a magical, booze-infused underground on good old Earth.…
