Literature in Translation |
“The Whisper of the Wind”
“They started in the middle of nowhere, heading towards what she supposed was the closest highway. The whole group began to walk, with the last rays of the sun skirting the hills that could be seen in the distance, very small, on the horizon.”
Poetry |
“Mother’s Day” & “Bad birds”
“Still I struggle to rise, breathing in the quiet, / trying to believe in patience / as I teach the child to make the bread, to mix the flour and water …”
Essay |
“Criminal Behavior”
“In the beginning, the fatal beating is just a local news story. A curiosity to follow. Terrible behavior reported in a newspaper circulated through small towns and rural communities within an hour’s drive.”
Literature in Translation |
from The Pure and the Impure
“I am revealing a leniency that people will find strange, that people will fault me for. It’s true that these two men whom I have just briefly depicted offered me the tangible expression of union, and even of dignity. A kind of austerity enveloped them …”
Interview |
“‘Call Every Resource’: on Muriel Rukeyser in the Twenty-First Century, with Catherine Gander & Stefania Heim”
“There is an uncanniness to how chillingly Rukeyser seems to anticipate aspects of our moment … understanding the deep impacts of living in perpetual war, her insight into the insidious interweaving of consumerism, journalism, and the war machine.”
Poetry |
“Gold Watch” & “Autumn”
“A person is a grieving monster, / said Aeschylus, the past / shapeless as muscle and expressed / as a faceless mass. It’s crawling out to eat.”
Poetry |
“After a Language Is Lost”
“My tongue, as if sitting on it / Two minutes of a day / heavy enough / to crush words / coming out my mouth.”
Fiction |
“Ecce Homo”
“She was nearing the end of book 72 in Dio Cassius, his chronicle of Ancient Rome, waiting on the line for which his book principally enjoys fame (“our history now descends from a kingdom of gold to one of iron and rust”), when she heard a disturbance in the yard.”
Poetry |
“Double Negative”
“On my third night there // I was out watering when my phone buzzed. / ‘I thought you all should know,’ the email began.”
Poetry |
“Epiphora, If That’s What It Is,” “An Old Man Walking Along a Trail, Under an Umbrella, Through Heavy Snow” & “Every Soul Smokes”
“Here’s the nine-mile cigarette John Prine planned to light, / with a vodka and ginger ale, when he arrived here. / We’re on a heavenly balcony, it’s a starlit night …”
Poetry |
“Beginning” & “The Gingerbread Man”
“Even what I didn’t have / was what I had — / I said that, / trying to believe myself / When I say myself I mean us / because / those were days when we were never found”
Literature in Translation |
“The Old Age of Narcissus,” “Fear,” “Prayer” & “First Communion”
“… from seeing myself so much in this cracked mirror / I’ve lost all sense of my face / or, from talking about it so much, it’s become infinite to me”
Poetry |
“The Scent from a Cupboard”
“breathes out what you were / & were not — / myrrh & the hanging / music of smoke”
Poetry |
“Ghazal” & “Rinsed Rice”
“It takes an image to describe the feeling / in another image; which is to say, / once I tore brittle leaves and hid them / in a book; which is to say, / whatever once lurked within / my honeycombed mind now evades / its reach …”
Literature in Translation |
“Restanza”
“People my age like to wallow in nostalgia for the town, in a romantic narrative of slow living, of sunshine, sea, and wind. I envy them. I wish I could be more forgiving toward my hometown, and toward myself too.”