Essay |
“We Try to Ignore the Elephant Somehow”
“Isbell’s songs provide the language for saying something that so few of us can say on our own, whether we’re racked by guilt or shame or grief for all the things that life does to us, and we do to life.”
Poetry |
“You Thrill Me So” & “Art”
“A speaker at the memorial for my friend Miles is saying / that when his wife died eleven years earlier, Miles never /got over it, which reminds me of a letter in the advice / column of today’s paper …”
Poetry |
“Suite for Alice”
“Oh my old friend now gone your fierceness is not abstract / It’s a matchless voice a calling out saying / I am here forever in the poems and damn you who think otherwise the nerve / You tyrants buried in my curse”
Poetry |
“Waiting for a Girl Like You”
“three hurricanes blew through no one / at the beach I waded ankle / deep glanced out to sea / a white fin parallel to keep me company”
Poetry |
“To Virginia, Lucia & Sylvia”
“With all my education — / my shelves and shelves of books, // my two degrees, I shrank into oblivion / as he lied and hid my pathology / report from me.”
Poetry |
“What is this fierce light”
“The past stretched over the field / impenetrable // I didn’t know others would be going so soon”
Essay |
“Dog People”
“Whenever I arrive at my regular coffee shop in the morning with my dog, Juneau, I hope that there will be other dogs on the wide front deck. If I don’t have sufficient caffeine in a single-shot latte by 9 a.m., I’ll get a migraine, but I don’t come to the coffee shop only for the lattes. I come for the dogs.”
Poetry |
“Grandsons alongside, Grandfather trundles …,” “Those children hop …” & “Skipping to school …”
“Skipping to school. Skipping / school. Skipping stones across // water. Skipping stones altogether.”
Essay |
“I Always Want to Wear Spring”
“I had planned to have the Chinese students over during spring break. A group of us had been meeting to translate poems by the late Chinese poet, Hai Zi (海子), and we’d had several conversations about Chinese and American culture.”
Poetry |
“This Book Belongs To”
“This prairie town shunned outsiders, kept dirt local: / Divorce, two suicides, abandonment, / unspoken scandal of a pregnant woman’s fall …”
Poetry |
“The Oracular Mirror” & “In the Mountains”
“the minority / which is not a minority / mail messages / to themselves // in preparation / (dying?) / of the field / of action —”
Poetry |
“In These My Lear Years”
“Lear, / It’s ok. / You have your way / Of doing / This senescence, / I have mine.”
Poetry |
“A Multi-Stemmed Deciduous Shrub of Great Beauty When in Bloom,” “The Art of the Novel” & The History of Music”
“It wasn’t clear / how long the muses / dressed as lunch ladies / kept the place open // The room got dark / though the sun was still out / I went home to think about it”
Literature in Translation |
“My City,” “Beginning of a Song,” “My Hands” & “The Smile Grieves”
“From my glance, which seeks a place to anchor, / comes a cloudy gloom overhanging the mirror, / like a harsh frost that lands / its white cold stamp.”
Literature in Translation |
“Traces,” “The Kite” & “Wilderness”
“From inhabiting the body where a third of its days are spent dreaming, traces remain. A feature in an open air theater. A whiff of the neighbor’s flower bed. A forbidden urge.”