Literature in Translation |
“Labour,” “Piano Factory” & “Without tears the eyes spill by themselves”
“Today I am clutching Mandelstam’s poem like a broken glass, / though it seems not of today, or yesterday, or tomorrow. / A poem explains nothing, / it’s like an orchestra wandering lost in the fields …”
Poetry |
“A Zoom Reading in Which Fanny Howe’s Computer Dies”
“Fanny begins to read, and through / the screen of her screen to mine, she says / she’s wearing the wrong glasses. Oh technology — // just failure made more efficient.”
Poetry |
“Awakening from a Dream” & “What the Migraine Said”
“The sleep of reason produces monsters — / this we know from art and the news: / murder and sham leaders shooting themselves / in one foot and chewing on the other.”
Poetry |
“The Mothers”
“The mothers watched us, / and we watched them, my mother working clay, / Barbara’s mother, long at her easel, Jean’s mother, / swimming and sketching.”
Literature in Translation |
from No Way in the Skin without This Bloody Embrace
“The sirens’ song provides an abridged idea of your / voice. You’re still this broken shimmer tormenting / the mirror of the banality of men.”
Poetry |
“Translating the Body”
“Our organs sing in different keys / like sirens in a sea of blood. / The body feels before it knows.”
Poetry |
“Ice Cream Truck”
“We will have cones, please. / Vanilla with rainbow sprinkles. / We will have the whole ice cream truck / and the street it is on. One serving / of the fence by the water. The water.”
Poetry |
“Walking to Synagogue on Yom Kippur” & “A Rock Is Not a Stone”
“… and before I could recall her name, the daughter / said: Who is Maya? and I thought, She’s not an angel.”
Literature in Translation |
“The Day Jupiter Met Saturn (Another Colorful Story)”
“From this angle, she looked less like a living woman than a watercolor painting, frozen as if she were very calm, and in fact she was, only she couldn’t feel anything anymore, she hadn’t for a long while.”
Essay |
“The Latest Scar in Time”
“May I clarify more of the ‘crack-up’? The non-speaking self draped itself with a different garter and gown, of the reading and reflective self — a near impossible person to share with others in mixed company …”
Poetry |
“The Lunch Lady: A Pantoum”
“What was her story? We didn’t care. / She was just the lunch lady; / the one who forced us to eat our sandwiches. / I can still see her reaching into the trash.”
Poetry |
“The Needle and the Thread”
“I live inside a book, the girl says to herself / We are all alive inside a book / That’s what you think, says the front door.”
Poetry |
“Histoire” & “Idyl”
“When I lifted my violin, the men at the bar // begged for Skynyrd, not Coltrane. / So I volunteered to be lonely.”
Poetry |
“Bitter Greens,” “Matisse in the National Gallery,” “It Is What It Is” & “Field Notes”
“If they could speak, they’d sound exactly like / those cranky ladies slowly poisoning themselves / on front porches up and down Brenwall Avenue / in 1964 …”