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My father served in the Army Air Force as a B-17 ball-turret gunner, flying out of the airbase at Foggia, Italy, 50 miles northeast of Naples. The city had been taken by the Allies after the landing at Salerno in September 1943. There were 8,000 Allied casualties on the beach. He tells this story.

Through a stroke of good fortune, I was in Portland, Oregon on April 20 when Paulann Petersen hosted an event to celebrate the publication of Floyd Skloot’s Selected Poems.

My business partner knows a man who made a pre-season $150 bet that the New England Patriots would go undefeated right through the Superbowl. I believe the odds were 40,000 to 1. The Pats won every regular season and playoff game; if they win the Superbowl, the man takes away $6,000,000. Then, the man received a call from the president of the casino. The offer: $2,000,000 to cancel the bet.

As a Harvard undergraduate in 1995, Sarah Manguso contracted a neurological disease called chronic idiopathic demyelinating polyradiculoneuropathy or CDIF, though her illness was initially misdiagnosed. “My disease has two steps,” she writes. “The immune system secretes antibodies into the blood. Then the blood delivers the antibodies to the peripheral neurons.