Essay |
“Bad News”
“He started walking west toward the Mississippi River which bordered the park, but he disappeared in the hazy darkness. The woman heard a splash. When she couldn’t locate him, she called the police.”
Poetry |
“Girls Department,” “1961” & “All At Once”
“My wet skirt stuck to the seat. / That breathtaking fist of pain / when the thickened wall I couldn’t see / shed its unbreathing ball of cells …”
Poetry |
“Summer, So Full”
“falcons coasting / on updrafts, / bougainvillea in bloom / and the dark high-res / glimmering indigo …”
Lyric Prose |
“Skate All the Way” & “I’ll Pick an Offering”
“Skate all the way. A slow two blocks to the park and then the two blocks back to your grandparents’ house on Robertson Road. The yellow house with the black porch swing and slick carport. Grapes in the arbor, hard and green.”
Poetry |
“Today My Mother Called to Apologize”
“Nothing else — she wanted to hang up / immediately after. She is 92. I am 64. / When I was 3, she put me in a diaper / to punish me for an accident.”
Poetry |
“Speaker,” “Fierce,” “Confessional” & “Concessions”
“Feral is the name given to what is wild / by what isn’t. Whatever it was that owned me, / that kept me guarded, has vanished, / has let me go …”
Poetry |
Poems from “The Lisa Sequence”
“… The last hour waiting / for clemency that does not come, telephone deadly still, petition / ignored. Last shifting its meaning from final to endure.”
Poetry |
“Duncan Farm November Meditation”
“what died with father / what died with mother / there was more i wanted to know / say again the names of distant places / russia lithuania ukraine”
Literature in Translation |
“Portrait of the hunt (the house)”
“Your idea of love was never excessive: / You first trust the thorn and then the rose, / in the fallow deer’s flight.”
Essay |
“On Whales and Language”
“In order to communicate meaningfully with animals, we have to set aside the fantasy in which they become ‘just like’ us.”
Literature in Translation |
On Translating The Postcard by Anne Berest & an Excerpt from the Novel
“I knew, going in, that this was partly a story of lives lost in the Holocaust. That raised the stakes immediately. Without Anne’s book, and everything that went into the writing of it, the members of her family who died at Auschwitz would have remained anonymous and silent.”
Poetry |
“Maybe the Messiah”
“Maybe the Messiah not coming is proof enough, Kafka chalks / across the board, that God exists. He’s subbing my eighth-grade / math class …”
Literature in Translation |
On Revisiting Amelia Rosselli’s The Dragonfly: Panegyric to Liberty (1958) — & an Excerpt
“Retranslating The Dragonfly offered an opportunity to revisit one of my favorite poems, to establish a through-line more clearly, and to eliminate errors that were minor but, for me, persistently nettlesome.”
Poetry |
“To the Last Bottle in the Back of My Fridge”
“I can quit whenever I want. / But not today, not now, / when you have just coaxed me onto a table / at the bar and now I am spiraling / out of sync with the music.”
Poetry |
“Minsk Elegy”
“In the year 1942 my relative Misha Luditsky, / A student, volunteered to fight the Germans. / He deported Chechens and Crimean Tatars.”