Poetry |
“To Gratitude” & “Leaves of Him”
“You secure his weight to my mastitic chest for our forty-third bus ride / from hospital to home. / You coat his saliva rash with petroleum jelly, coax him to eat a smashed avocado / and swaddle him, too.”
Fiction |
“Maestro” and “Through”
“The number of firepit watchers increased and it struck me that more than a handful seemed disapproving of my presence. Had some mention of me turned up in the county newspaper concerning one of my interests?”
Lyric Prose |
“The Enchantment of Death: Briar Rose”
“Every child who learns a story by heart learns his or her own story. Unbeknownst to the child, it speaks inside her, through the forms of the fairy tale, the life knotted in her blood that will dissolve over the years.”
Literature in Translation |
“The Beloved of the Dawn”
“Eos, goddess of the dawn, once slept with Ares — every Rosy Fingered One sleeps with him once. Aphrodite surprised them …”
Poetry |
“The Problem of Foliage”
“The human approach, to do one’s utter best / to identify, number, and trace the shape of each / as far as the picture extends (to keep the picture small) …”
Literature in Translation |
“Honeymoon”
“I was looking for some Goyeneche among my records on the corner shelf when all of a sudden, he asked did I have any pasillos? I stood there like I’d been struck by lightning. What kind of Yankee had tastes like that?”
Essay |
“This Lviv”
“Your memories of the Holocaust, did they produce any true anguish in me at the time, or did I feel they were sad fossils imprinted in bygone air? Yet those memories give rise to the rough gnarls in me that hurt my gut.”
Essay |
“At The Dakota”
“So I stripped a lot of paint — and later, upon becoming a principal in the firm and eventually the president (a title which simply indicated that I did everything myself), I restored a number of the larger apartments in the building to their former 19th-century glory.”
Poetry |
“1970”
“The children wrote to soldiers in Vietnam / to learn about language arts and geography. / The popular girl’s pen pal wrote back, sent gifts, / strode into Room 6 once on leave, all camouflage / and smiles.”
Literature in Translation |
from “The Aeronaut”
“Born into hardship, Gao Likuan had grown tired of people’s sneers and joined the Communists to print their leaflets. His leaflets were better than anyone else’s, his colors more vivid, only growing stronger with time.”
Poetry |
“Another Green World” and “Wild”
“Each room you dwell in / becomes a Louvre of ruthless vanity, / plush dark chamber of alien secrecy.”
Poetry |
“Dream Poem” and “Cinnamon”
“You really murdered that sestina / says the officer questioning an MFA candidate / while leafing through his thesis. / Maybe, says Good Cop, sitting on his desk, / but you could still save it if you’d just / put it in your own words.”
Essay |
from How To Steal A Culture
“Don’t go to her house. Don’t visit her neighborhood. You can’t be around too many black people at once — you should hit just the right note of not racist, slightly ignorant.”
Literature in Translation |
from The Aphorisms of Franz Kafka
“The aphorist Elias Canetti, drawing on his own reading experience, noted: ‘The great aphorists read as though they had all known one another well.’ This was certainly not true of Kafka.”
Literature in Translation |
“Full Throttle,” “Hand,” “We” & “When”
“Even in / the most benevolent / hand, there was still / money, and there is more / than enough of death.”