Essay |
“Reading Chekhov in a Pandemic”
“Chekhov is the perfect writer for our current moment: aware and tolerant of life’s ingrained inertia, he pushes us to at least challenge it.”
Poetry |
“Tosca”
“When I dream, I dream / of emptiness. I am standing at the end / of a long hallway. As at the end of Tosca, / the dead all rise again, applauded / the same …”
Poetry |
“Come into the house / Come in now!”
“the yard is / her factory / everything / calls to / her to be / made”
Essay |
“‘A Giving of the Self’: on Thom Gunn and Courtliness”
“Looking over the span of Gunn’s writing, I get the sense of someone grounded in his own being, a self he inhabits with great confidence and apparent ease in large part because he is not especially concerned with himself.”
Poetry |
“His Name Is Sam,” “No One’s Perfect” & “At the Church in Sacramento”
“I used to see him every week when we were kids / at the main public library. I would stare at him, wishing / he sat closer to me. Not once did I think he’d stab me.”
Literature in Translation |
“The hood of my sweatshirt,” “On the other side of the Atlantic” & “O Street”
“Here, the day I put on my blue ‘Just Do It’ / and pulled the hood over my head for shelter / from the relentless cold also running down the street, / I offered myself to death by / police. Just for the hood. And my skin.”
Poetry |
“Strangers in Our Own Earth”
“We have been made into something other: / something ancient, swallowed —// badland curves set from the once of subtropics, / maybe single-celled algae and zooplankton.”
Fiction |
“The Peshaman Fragments”
“When at rest, the mouth often does not relax but returns to a puckered, circular kissing shape that suggests it is at once both open and closed, an orifice of both inbound and outbound potential.”
Literature in Translation |
from Anima
“The body was interspersed and interwoven by veins of light. It / floats in the air. On its gray death shroud it floats high above the city / in the green summer air in the flood of light which pulls along with it / city, hospital, people in raging swirls upward …”
Poetry |
“Circe in the Age of Instagram”
“Nothing is anachronism / if you live forever, it says // in my bio. I started with / carefully composed shots // of the island, sun filtered / through olive grove and arbor …”
Fiction |
“Facts About Bald Men,” “Up On the Roof,” “The Bald Man and His Twin,” “Return of the Kleptomaniac” & “Prayer for Hair”
“I stole the last hair from a bald man. The blackish-gray hair was surprisingly long, maybe three feet in length, and had wrapped around his head several times and dangled down his back.”
Poetry |
“The Kite” & “The Unlikeliness of Empty Spaces”
“This is what it means to be in the now; / release a kite to the wind, / feel the tug of a string, / his small face turns up, / all fascination to the sky.”
Poetry |
“Legacy of Blue,” “Incarnations,” “Incarnation Intercept Sonnet,” “Riven, Driven Back” & “Jacob’s Ladder”
“But to keep vision / intact, I stand back, / asking nothing of it / but the sun’s stance / on the diurnal, / incarnation’s probe / of recurrence, / that fire I walk through.”
Lyric Prose |
“Under the Harsh Light”
“Coming back from the countryside to be a high school teacher, I said, My nose is not pretty, when the school leader said, You have such beautiful eyes.”
Poetry |
“A Reading from the Epistle of Horace the Paralytic at Corinth”
“Thus, our Lord / spoke even me, Horace Parlan — // Horace the Paralytic — / into historical bones.”