March/April 2024 Edition

Lyric Prose |

“You & the Dying Languages,” “You in Exile” & “A Girl Like You”

“But when your father, then your mother, died, you imposed sanctions on your own grief and resumed your steady gait to work. Because who is ever really punished by a republic of troubled ghosts?”

Poetry |

“The Reader,” “A Snail,” “The Rabbits” & “Anniversary”

“As a child I ate rabbit, though I didn’t know it. My father / kept them in hutches along our high back fence. //. We fed them a bit, but mostly kept away — the mothers / would eat the babies if we bothered them too much, he told us.”

Commentary |

on The Extinction of Irena Rey, a novel by Jennifer Croft

“Weaving our ecological woes among ancient myths, she nestles the whole lot into a timely saga of translation … embedded in a crafty mystery story. Or is it?”

Literature in Translation |

“Pankow”

“We’re fleeing and forget that after the war a whole country was fleeing – from itself, from the Russians, from guilt, from terror, from pain. The country fled into affluence, gluttony, repression, hedonism, anti-fascism, escapism.”

Nonfiction |

“Trouble With Tuna”

“Most people are not aware of the protocol for scattering human ashes at sea. For starters, you must be accompanied by a licensed captain. Your boat must be located at least three nautical miles from shore and any other vessel.”

Commentary |

on The Freaks Came Out to Write: The Definitive History of The Village Voice, the Radical Paper That Changed American Culture by Tricia Romano

“Their critics weren’t afraid to say what they thought. They wrote the way my friends and I talked about the books we read. And they picked titles that weren’t stacked on the tables in Barnes & Noble.”

Poetry |

“Blue Oracle” & “We Forgot”

“I was born into violence, of word, / of body, but we did not speak of it outside our house. / We never spoke of it inside either. I didn’t know / what happened there happened elsewhere …”

Commentary |

on The Life of Tu Fu by Eliot Weinberger

“His remix of Du Fu’s work transports us beyond the boundaries of individual poems and, as far as that might be possible, into the mind that produced these poems … [he is] adamant that his book be taken not as a translation but, instead, as Du Fu’s ‘fictional autobiography.'”

Poetry |

“Poem In Which I Insist This Is A Good Day

“The textile mills in my hometown / in Rhode Island are mostly dead. My parents are both dead. They wore / heart monitors with sticky tape and both took Coumadin / which thins the blood.”

Commentary |

Book Notes: on Trace Evidence, poems by Charif Shanahan — On Giving Up, essays by Adam Phillips — & Tell, a novel by Jonathan Buckley

“Trace Evidence is a beginning that claims no destination, no goal. The destination is unlanguaged. These are poems that appear to have emerged not from a comprehensible ‘I’ but from the disruptions and retardations of the world at large.”

Commentary |

on Wandering Stars, a novel by Tommy Orange

“He pinches grammar and syntax, tweaks switchbacks and inversions, unrolls single-sentence paragraphs with cadences like drum beats. It’s this formal inventiveness that may be the novel’s master stroke.”

Literature in Translation |

from Lonespeech (Ensamtal)

“the smoke goes into the eye / the eye into the smoke / also they have / only that grave”

Fiction |

“Teeth,” “The Man and the Woman” & “The Carpenter”

“Since the floor was a darkly stained oak polished to a sheen, the ceiling could see his own reflection if he looked intently, as one lover might look into another’s eyes and see himself captured there.”

Poetry |

“Imperial Virus (Scarab)”

“… He had affixed himself / to the side of my sandal like a brooch. / As I realized who he was, I could feel I was about // to be frightened: stopped myself.”

Poetry |

“Nothing So Beautiful” & “Under all there’s little difference”

“Yesterday, I had faith in the spindle / of an aspen / and the taut skin / of a flat blue sky / I knew the alphabet / rolling across the tongue / the way the wind knows far- / flung leaves”

Poetry |

“Nightly,” “Under a Cloudless Sky” & “Aubade with Selfies”

“If I think of a field of wheat in September, tawny and rippling, can I set it aflame? Will the fire kneel after it consumes every stalk?”

Commentary |

on Verdigris, a novel by Michele Mari, translated from the Italian by Brian Robert Moore

“This novel follows some basic narrative beats, but it remains fundamentally stranger than that — due in no small part to the way that Mari employs ambiguity throughout.”

Poetry |

“Dear Mother VI” & “For the Tired Ones”

“It’s not that beautiful things must live. / But they look like the butterflies children draw, / & if we’re killing even beautiful things / what chance is there?”

Commentary |

on Creature, poems by Marsha de la O

“The non-duality of god comprises the concurrent potentials of mirroring and witnessing between humans and the natural world, perceiving and perceived creatures. This is a collection with which to experience such uncertainties as if they were sacred. Because they are.”

Text and Image |

“Landscape Peopled with Figurines” & “Regarding the Question of Ownership”

“Many have been employed / unearthing the remnants of culture, / wrestling artifacts and knick-knacks from their cribbing – / but our frames are too slight / for the collection of fears we carry.”

Essay |

“Unmoored: A Meditation”

“Weeks have passed since the evening explosion in a neighbor’s attached garage, the fire that followed consuming the bulk of their house before the volunteer firemen’s hoses were even unspooled.”

Poetry |

“Right to Life” & “Burying Jews Since 1973”

“Look, it isn’t lonely here / any more than an idea is lonely // before it shows up (or not) in your mind. You know that feeling / when it half-exists? That’s the beauty of / The Void.”

Poetry |

“From the Body”

“we longed for wet darkness     the aftermath / of burial and that fractioning of flesh / far in the circular currents of the earth”

Essay |

“The Water Lot”

“Stories were the common currency in lumber camp, kitchen, and barn. Tink, who began logging at 13 years old and weighing 108 pounds, blessed our family with a lot of those tales.”

Commentary |

on Inland, a novel by Gerald Murnane

“Murnane has been variously described as an oddball and a recluse. He himself does little to dispel this impression. At a conference on Murnane held in the small Australian town of Goroke, he was the bartender.”

Commentary |

on My Heavenly Favorite, a novel by Lucas Rijneveld, translated from the Dutch by Michele Hutchison

“This novel can be as shocking as its predecessor, The Discomfort of Evening, but is narrated by a pedophile, alternately rapturous and castigating, who details how he preys on a distraught teen desperate to be seen and understood.”

Crónica |

“Bob Weir’s Guitar”

“He must have been in his early 20’s, maybe not much older than I was at the time. Beard voluminous and tangled, face brick-red from exposure, black hair askew over his forehead, he wrote at a furious pace.”

Literature in Translation |

“That the Song May Return to Sinera One Day” & “The Governor”

“I have stopped time / and cling to memories I love / from past winters. // But you will laugh / since you see how Catalan lips / stay sealed.”

Poetry |

“Self-Facing Ghazal” & “The Body is Nothing but Stories”

“Ochre, vermillion, and deep blue gashes / cohere in one of the truest records of a face // you knew best from dwelling in it, your gaze / focused for endless months on another’s face.”

Commentary |

on Under the Wings of the Valkyrie, a novel by Sjón

“’What am I doing here?’ I asked. ‘This is your interview with me,’ he said. ‘You’re going to let me ask you questions about Under the Wings of the Valkyrie?’ ‘Yes!'”

Commentary |

on How We Named the Stars, a novel by by Andrés N. Ordorica

“As in the long novelistic tradition of portraying the paradoxes of love, here love is both an idealizing filter and a force that pierces the facades.”

Commentary |

on The Possessed, a novel by Witold Gombrowicz, translated from the Polish by Antonia Lloyd-Jones

“… a kaleidoscope of Gombrowicz’s subjects, themes and intrigues, chief among them illicit desire, class dynamics, and the wish to get to know oneself while fleeing with disgust in the opposite direction.”

Interview |

A Conversation with Jennifer Jean

“The word voz means voice in Portuguese. The poems aren’t so much about what I’m voicing or the fact of voicing, but how I’ve decided to voice — my answer to the lyric by Amalia Rodrigues — Com que voz chorarrai meu triste fado? Which means: With what voice will I cry my sad fate?”

Poetry |

“Constellations”

“On my back at the physical / therapist’s office I consider / why in the tiles overhead // the spray of holes / echoes a starfield photograph …”

Essay |

“Windows”

“Jim and I had restored many double hung wood windows during the time we worked together. We had also become pretty good friends, and then partners in a small but fairly successful restoration business.”

Poetry |

“Divination” & “Linked”

“With one massive arm / she hugged the huge / brown ram around its chest / so its legs hung, / hooves grazing ground. // In the other hand, ungloved, / shears buzzed.”

Poetry |

“The Relics We Carry”

“The head of St. Catherine, the heart of St. Camillus, the tongue / of St. Anthony, the blood of St. Januarius. The relics we carry.”

Commentary |

on Where the Wind Calls Home, a novel by Samar Yazbek, translated from the Arabic by Leri Price

“… a mercurial political climate, stressed family relations, the horrors of Civil War, the voice of a dying teenager, and the mysticism of the natural world in a tightly packed novel depicting the traditions of a Syrian Alawite village.”

Fiction |

“Incandescent Obsolescence”

“But our life expectancies hover around 203. More than enough time for an average of four twenty-year marriages with a full gender array of spouses — organic and AI — with the final decades of our lives whiled away on the well-appointed Archipelago of the Old, wrinkle-free and comfortably numb …”

Poetry |

“The Underworld” & “Mudman”

“I press on through the half-light, reaching // at last the crossing where she’s kept. Amber / light projects her number on the plinth. // Make no mistake. This is the one you seek …”