Poetry |
“Tea With Yak Milk”
“Just a cold / morning and a small group of men // except me // and maybe the body they carefully place / on bare rock …”
Poetry |
“Bridge/Insurrection,” “On Sundays They Shoot at Nothing” & “Ideas”
“I wanted to howl. Maybe I wanted to kill but I knew where the fences were. I licked salt from the rails, swished my tail, ruminated.”
Essay |
“One Word Makes A World”
“ ‘Every word matters’ goes the truism, which ought to prove true with the greatest poems (or at least the greatest lyric poems); but does it, if put to the test? … I’m thinking about writing in which one word releases an entirely new way of reading it, otherwise unavailable.”
Poetry |
“My Lost Generation”
“The last onionskin, Wite-Out, / and carbon paper led to the last of Miss Rossiter, // said to be reading palms in LA.”
Essay |
“The Novella: Some Thoughts About the Uncanny Genre”
“When we’ve finished reading a novella, we may be left a bit bereft, even bewildered. Yet if the novella were any longer, the plot might lose the ambiguity, the stroke of irrationality, the heightened state of tension that novellas make possible.”
Poetry |
“Girl Walking Uphill in Darkness (Nine Inquiries)” and “Abysmal Zone”
“if every morning I move the complete contents of one drawer to another drawer / if every day full / becomes empty / do I need a lock / do I need to tell someone / the combination …”
Essay |
“Washington, DC” and “Mars”
“Although today they aren’t as central to his legacy, Noguchi sculpted many heads. In the early years, they made up the greater part of his practice.”
Fiction |
“Something Special,” “My Mother the Realtor,” “The Salesman Grows Sad” & “The Salesman Gets A Suit” from The House of Grana Padano
“‘Beautiful people become beautiful by living in these houses,’ she would say. At home, late in the evening, she’d tell me, ‘The business is drying up.'”
Poetry |
“Holocene”
“I thumbed through a picture book / called Deep Time whose first / blank page it said was outer space / before anything existed / to be the outer of …”
Nonfiction |
“The Most Beautiful Chaos: Lucinde, or the Audacity of Love,” an excerpt from Jena 1800, The Republic of Free Spirits
“That was precisely Schlegel’s strategy, because it revealed something essential about reality — that it, too, was rarely as clear-cut as people thought, and it, too, sometimes started to flicker, to oscillate nervously between the extremes.”
Poetry |
“the place” and “the judge”
“tell me the lights existed. / tell me that you still breathe the smoke of a thousand cigarettes. / tell me that there is a cold droplet dripping down / the necks of all Augusts.”
Poetry |
“Fool Reversed / Let Go”
“perhaps a great emptiness / is what is needed — / space for the crack / or crevice to sound // its vast sudden / triumph …”
Poetry |
“Smokescreen”
“The audience gasped. / It was all they could do. // My last line sang / into silence …”
Poetry |
“When I Say Clean Your Room,” “When I Say Okay Take My Car,” & “When I Say It’s Your Life“
“Not long ago it all / fell to me, holding her / on my lap at Public Health / when our cheap insurance / wouldn’t cover vaccines.”
Essay |
Uncanny Pretending: on Keith Kopka’s Count Four
“He makes us ‘test’ not only ‘the materiality of the phenomena,’ as Freud writes, but also the morality of it … where — especially for a privileged white man — beauty and mastery are not the product of repressed, animated atrocity.”