Fiction |
“Ecce Homo”
“She was nearing the end of book 72 in Dio Cassius, his chronicle of Ancient Rome, waiting on the line for which his book principally enjoys fame (“our history now descends from a kingdom of gold to one of iron and rust”), when she heard a disturbance in the yard.”
Poetry |
“Double Negative”
“On my third night there // I was out watering when my phone buzzed. / ‘I thought you all should know,’ the email began.”
Poetry |
“Epiphora, If That’s What It Is,” “An Old Man Walking Along a Trail, Under an Umbrella, Through Heavy Snow” & “Every Soul Smokes”
“Here’s the nine-mile cigarette John Prine planned to light, / with a vodka and ginger ale, when he arrived here. / We’re on a heavenly balcony, it’s a starlit night …”
Poetry |
“Beginning” & “The Gingerbread Man”
“Even what I didn’t have / was what I had — / I said that, / trying to believe myself / When I say myself I mean us / because / those were days when we were never found”
Literature in Translation |
“The Old Age of Narcissus,” “Fear,” “Prayer” & “First Communion”
“… from seeing myself so much in this cracked mirror / I’ve lost all sense of my face / or, from talking about it so much, it’s become infinite to me”
Poetry |
“The Scent from a Cupboard”
“breathes out what you were / & were not — / myrrh & the hanging / music of smoke”
Poetry |
“Ghazal” & “Rinsed Rice”
“It takes an image to describe the feeling / in another image; which is to say, / once I tore brittle leaves and hid them / in a book; which is to say, / whatever once lurked within / my honeycombed mind now evades / its reach …”
Literature in Translation |
“Restanza”
“People my age like to wallow in nostalgia for the town, in a romantic narrative of slow living, of sunshine, sea, and wind. I envy them. I wish I could be more forgiving toward my hometown, and toward myself too.”
Poetry |
“Untitled” & “Found Abecedarian: Your Guide to Total Health Care, 1996“
“We’re in public. Academic // coffee complete with neatly inked / questions in my notebook. He presses // gold-rimmed glasses closer …”
Essay |
“Strange Gatherings: The Nightworld of ‘Dream Song #10′”
“If ‘Dream Song #10’’s dreaming Henry stands for Berryman dreaming … then the Song represents one of Berryman’s most agonized debates between his racist and his progressive instincts.”
Poetry |
“Intermezzo” & “My Mother and Robert Penn Warren”
“At the end of La Bohème / Rudolpho gives Mimi a muff / to help keep her warm. / I thought of that as I held his hand. / It was midnight, an hour / until he let go of mine.”
Literature in Translation |
“The Gap Between Mountains,” “The Wheat Is Ripe” & “Boundless Snow”
“The sky rises higher every moment. / On top of our heads a tile-blue hat / adds to the weight of Wanxi Basin. / From all directions laborers learn its lessons / and get more ignorant, too.”
Essay |
“Frank Rosenblatt in Passing: The Rebirth of the Mimetic Impulse”
“Now we recognize that what he explored and created are at the core of Artificial Intelligence, a technology transforming communication, research, design and the nature of work.”
Poetry |
“The Chalk Pig”
“Where I was, was pitch dark. / I was alone in it, / with a sound like a chirp ‘ or what a broken windowpane might make / as its pieces fell slowly to the floor.”
Poetry |
“A Planet Is A Moment”
“In the before is / everything possible / in the after even / the nothing that’s / there is missed / its absence / remarkable”