Poetry |
“Lucky Man” & “Stella D’Oro”
“And he’d earned one stamp at least, because, // he said to Val, just making sure, those cans of soup / she was ringing up were five for $5, and he bought ten …”
Literature in Translation |
from The Number on Your Arm is Blue Like Your Eyes
“I’ve never met anyone younger than I with a number on his or her arm, but what would be so special about that? Those who try to sensationalize the memory of the Shoah or heap superlatives onto it trivialize the suffering of victims or veer into kitsch.”
Poetry |
“magnificent height” & “[and what we have come to, says ‘childless’]”
magnificent height here in the non-light of evening i am not magnetic or ringed or blue like a sliver no sentiment arrives and the ceiling is one magnificent height and the man at the restaurant says he will buy me all 63 of saturn's moons to get away with something…
Essay |
“History” and “Warranty”
“After years of couples counseling, we finally bought a new mattress. After the first night, he said he didn’t like it and went back onto the mattress in the guest room. And I felt relieved.”
Poetry |
“For Our Fathers Teetering in Retirement” & “Quarry”
“Leisure escapes me / when I look straight at it. Only work / of a certain kind appeases me. A phase / I think I’ll pass through. Get ready, / says the snapper, for what comes after.”
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.”
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.”
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 …”
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.”
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”