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.”
Poetry |
“Three Days,” “Coppice” & “Cicadas”
“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.”
Poetry |
“Chronological Still Life,” “Copy 2” & “Musical Instrument Using Gravity 2”
“I want to paint with / the actual fruit, here on the table, / not a copy but the thing itself — / per Jack Spicer, to make my poems / out of real objects. The lemon to be a lemon the reader / could cut or squeeze or taste.”
Lyric Prose |
“Ashes, Ashes”
“The ash content in the atmosphere creates gorgeous sunsets over the still waters of Lake Tahoe — where I stand on its northern shore considering the aperture settings on my camera …”
Poetry |
“Often,” “The way out is to forget” & “All I Float Past, and Below”
“During a neighborhood walk, the pharmacy’s an arm’s length reach — / lipsticks and opioids — I’m quick to avoid the alley running / alongside this moment, knife-lined and spit gobbed …”
Essay |
“Both Silence and Words”: Two Books, a Video, and a Surveillance File
“Carmen Bugan, a writer whose life has been marked by borders demarcating the speakable from the unspeakable, the thought from the crime, the self from the state, the I from the We.”
Poetry |
“Field Days” & “The Old Mill”
“Last together behind his wood shed, / making out against the worn shingles / until his girlfriend tracked us down, gripping // a pitchfork …”
Literature in Translation |
“The Wasp of Time,” “A Glass Dress” & “Peephole”
“It won’t let me part, it won’t let me inside — / so we’ll stand here like this and we’ll look / at each other this way today, tomorrow, forever. / O my enemy, mirror-eye!”
Fiction |
“Fengshui”
“When Ying died of an unknown disease at age 36, her only son, a thin and short 12-year old boy, could neither afford to hire anyone to move her body to the family graveyard, nor do the job by himself.”
Poetry |
“Things I Forgot to Tell You”
“At times, I can still be twelve and play alone with nothing to lose but marbles. / At times, there’s a distance between my faces. / One haunts one’s own life.”