Literature in Translation |
“No,” “Talk Less” & “I am tired”
“Slowly. / Yell at me. / So I can really hear you, fully grasp what you say / and determine who is in charge.”
Poetry |
“Down by the Humus Lake”
“water worries the house posts / sits on the steps // moody / made of murk // eventually / we approach the door / the stairway down // carrying our lights / our tendency / to drown”
Poetry |
“The Visible Woman”
“Her open palms faced out — / she looked like she was asking for mercy. // I stopped playing with The Visible Woman / when she started reminding me / of Jesus Christ on his crucifix.”
Poetry |
“Invisible,” “Window I” & “Window II”
“… If I were / in a painting, if you were // to turn that painting upside- / down, I’d fall from water // into sky. What would you see? / A blur of blue …”
Fiction |
“Thinker” & “Second Chances”
“She told her husband that she was tired of pretending to be smart. She had been undone since the surgery, her thoughts short circuiting all over the place after twenty minutes of thinking.”
Poetry |
“On Ellsworth Road”
“See the cracks in our foundations? / But Sharon isn’t worried about that. / Tonight, and every night: Who will feed the feral cats — / her front step is lined with aluminum bowls …”
Essay |
“We Try to Ignore the Elephant Somehow”
“Isbell’s songs provide the language for saying something that so few of us can say on our own, whether we’re racked by guilt or shame or grief for all the things that life does to us, and we do to life.”
Poetry |
“You Thrill Me So” & “Art”
“A speaker at the memorial for my friend Miles is saying / that when his wife died eleven years earlier, Miles never /got over it, which reminds me of a letter in the advice / column of today’s paper …”
Poetry |
“Suite for Alice”
“Oh my old friend now gone your fierceness is not abstract / It’s a matchless voice a calling out saying / I am here forever in the poems and damn you who think otherwise the nerve / You tyrants buried in my curse”
Poetry |
“Waiting for a Girl Like You”
“three hurricanes blew through no one / at the beach I waded ankle / deep glanced out to sea / a white fin parallel to keep me company”
Poetry |
“To Virginia, Lucia & Sylvia”
“With all my education — / my shelves and shelves of books, // my two degrees, I shrank into oblivion / as he lied and hid my pathology / report from me.”
Poetry |
“What is this fierce light”
“The past stretched over the field / impenetrable // I didn’t know others would be going so soon”
Essay |
“Dog People”
“Whenever I arrive at my regular coffee shop in the morning with my dog, Juneau, I hope that there will be other dogs on the wide front deck. If I don’t have sufficient caffeine in a single-shot latte by 9 a.m., I’ll get a migraine, but I don’t come to the coffee shop only for the lattes. I come for the dogs.”
Poetry |
“Grandsons alongside, Grandfather trundles …,” “Those children hop …” & “Skipping to school …”
“Skipping to school. Skipping / school. Skipping stones across // water. Skipping stones altogether.”
Essay |
“I Always Want to Wear Spring”
“I had planned to have the Chinese students over during spring break. A group of us had been meeting to translate poems by the late Chinese poet, Hai Zi (海子), and we’d had several conversations about Chinese and American culture.”