Featured

Poetry |

“Three Days,” “Coppice” & “Cicadas”

three poems by Peter Streckfus

“I think he didn’t want me to see. He told me to go check the rods. / When I came back, the hare’s jacket was off, his intestines were out, and we baked him on the grill.”

Literature in Translation |

“Onwards,” “Too Philosophical,” “Doll,” “The Comfort of Complaining,” “The Benefits of Talking,” “To a Writer,” “Self-Reflection” & “I Wish I Had”

eight poems by Robert Walser, translated from the German by Daniele Pantano

“How ghostly my life / in its fall and rise. / Always I see myself waving to myself, /’ floating away from the one waving. // I see myself as laughter, / as deep mourning again, ‘/ as a wild weaver of talk; / but all this falls away.”

Fiction |

“I Saw Elvis in Palm Springs”

a story by Brooke Henzell

“Claudia was in Palm Springs because she’d made a fairly lucrative commercial deal with a Japanese yogurt company and wanted to go somewhere alone where she could pretend she’d come by the money in a more respectable way. Like phishing or selling drugs.”

Essay |

“‘A Giving of the Self’: on Thom Gunn and Courtliness”

an essay by Jonathan Farmer

“Looking over the span of Gunn’s writing, I get the sense of someone grounded in his own being, a self he inhabits with great confidence and apparent ease in large part because he is not especially concerned with himself.”

Literature in Translation |

from Motherfield

five poems by Julia Cimafiejeva, translated from the Belarusian by Valzhyna Mort and Hanif Abdurraqib

“Every year the motherfield is a bride / under a thin muslin of snow, / under the strict supervision of tradition, / it is smoothed with rakes, / combed with ploughs, / inseminated.”

Commentary |

on Come Back in September, a memoir by Darryl Pinckney

reviewed by Mark Athitakis

“Pinckney’s growth is a function of his understanding the limitations of the circle that’s invited him in — its intellectual distance from the crises they write about, its interpersonal dramas, its whiteness.”

Poetry |

from the “Monpeyroux Sonnets”

a sequence of poems by Marilyn Hacker

“A rainy Monday, everything is shut. / It could be late October; it’s mid-May. / Lights on at noon, outside, rain drums on gray / paving stones, drainpipes, voices.”

Commentary |

on Midwest Materials, photographs by Julie Blackmon

reviewed by Mark Athitakis

“She has a trained eye for children’s rambunctiousness, the way they eagerly claim and rework adult spaces, and the fear they can strike in mom and dad’s hearts … All of which gives her best photos a frisson of uncertainty.”

Fiction |

“Otra Noche En Miami”

a story by Bessie Flores Zaldívar

“Santi and I came here — I mean Miami, not Mango’s — to be queer as fuck. Queer as possible before being shipped back to Honduras, closeted and impossible.”

Commentary |

on Back to the Drawing Board: Ed Ruscha, Art, and Design in the 1960s by Jennifer Quick

reviewed by D.J. Waldie

“A sharp reminder that Ruscha’s art began with the know-how and materials of pre-digital advertising, signage, and package design. These disciplines ‘presented Ruscha with a richly layered landscape of forms, images, and methods, as well as a way of thinking and seeing and being in the world'” …

Commentary |

on The Hurting Kind, poems by Ada Limón

reviewed by Calista McRae

“She remembers earlier places, interests, and attachments as existing in a time when she had ‘so much future ahead of me it was like my own ocean.’ Now she assumes that a phone ringing at night is bad news.”