Poetry |
“In Heat”
“When sex was new, // that smell felt free. I believed giving / my body helped me own it. When an animal / is in heat, does it perceive what that will bring?”
Literature in Translation |
from So the Day Begins: Grief Refrain, poems by Anja Utler
“So the day begins, / kettle vibrates, something in / the sink is clinking / chatter of metallic teeth”
Poetry |
“Horseless” & “Cherokee Parts Store”
“The distant past is indigenous. / The present hints at prophesy, / a country with more cars than drivers, // three hundred million vehicles.”
Poetry |
“The Boys, Waiting (Petaled Gloaming)”
“He was a queer anarchist / with a mouth on him so when hassled / by a cop for riding his bike / on the sidewalk he jumped off, bike chain / clutched in his scabbed fists.”
Poetry |
“During elementary school, I was pulled out of class”
“A decade and a half later, / only my laptop kept time during jail visits. // Here in Arizona, in a house with no clocks, / only overpriced electronics / signal the hour.”
Poetry |
“Given” & “After Some Words Scrawled on a Bathroom Stall”
“I go by a name not mine but given to me / among mountains by Italian hosts impatient / with my own, its clash of consonant // coming to bear like sandpaper upon / the tongue.”
Poetry |
“A Moose Breathes Onto My Palm”
“In the painting, a rabbit / is riding a moose] / or perhaps a reindeer. I’ve never been good / at identifying large mammals …”
Poetry |
“Refuge”
“My mother painted a colorful jungle / on the upstairs balcony with a deer, bear, / lion, elephant, wolf, lamb and birds / looking at me as they flapped.”
Fiction |
“In the Walls”
“Mice. The realization hits me, and then I am on my knees by the bathroom sink, hands shaking and snatching at the Lorazepam I’ve spilled. Panic hits this way, like a revolver fired to your head from behind.”
Literature in Translation |
“Over the church,” “I trust this book,” “Over a black abyss of water” & “To the poet, the century hasn’t given a thought”
“If the century doesn’t care for the ancestors, / I don’t care for its great-grandchildren: the herd. / My century — my poison, my century — my harm, / my century — my enemy, my century — hell.”
Poetry |
“The Novel”
“Over the span of twenty pages / these quiet moments from the man’s past / are interspersed with his present / where a slow but steady trickle of information / allows us to piece together these facts …”
Poetry |
“Enthusiasts” & “Narrative”
“They understand a simple thing / is never simple and get / all electric about it, / like my beautiful friends / who ignite over words …”
Fiction |
“Plunder”
“Asal, my neighbor, was in class next door, and she told secrets about worlds I had never imagined. For instance, her twin brother and father couldn’t visit Persia anymore because ‘the army might make them fight.'”
Interview |
“A Dialogue with Derek Mong”
“I encounter a lot of overly long and under-edited books, many weighed down by prose poems. Some feel strident. These books sound like they began with a thesis, not a question.”
Poetry |
“1986”
“That was the year my mom got a teaching job at my school. / Her classroom, a trailer on the tarmac.”