Interview |
A Conversation with Juan Felipe Herrera
“One of the first songs I learned was ‘Contraband de El Paso.’ It’s about being picked up by border patrol and taken to Leavenworth. I used to sing that when I was a child.”
Poetry |
“A Monk After Dark,” “Haze” & “The Poet’s Indolence”
“In earliest spring, he’d look for better, say, than melting. // The winter hardwoods would deserve more than naked. / In summer, he’d need to allow green frogs to do more than twang.”
Poetry |
“ICU” and “Asked for a Voice Recording”
“Now I could rub off / as easily as scales / from a moth’s wing / and he wants to know / what makes up my mind.”
Interview |
“Disturbing the Surface”: A Conversation with Page Hill Starzinger
“About my writing life as a copy director at Aveda … At a cosmetic company, copy was approved by multiple departments. So I was relieved to write whatever I wanted on weekends, to be just as complicated, fragmented, moody, negative, and idiosyncratic in my own poetry as I wished.”
Fiction |
“The Seventh Degree of Freedom”
“He said goodnight and went back aft to join my mother in the cockpit. I nestled into the fabric, facing skyward, glad to be out of the stifling cabin.”
Poetry |
“Hexagon-Tiled Bathroom Floor”
“we’ve met before, you and your thousand / sisters close as thin-walled honeycomb, / bathroom floor the little theater of childhood …”
Poetry |
“Cleaning Up” and “Message From David”
“I wash the dishes / and think about the little girl / in the ad who says, ‘What / does the dishwasher do?'”
Poetry |
“What Do You Make of That?” “We All Know We Don’t Have Enough Lifeboats” & “Autumn, Mississippi”
“I am watching my country point / to its own dying body and yell Hoax! / Always, everyone is predictable — the practiced / defenses, the war metaphors …”
Fiction |
“Should we talk about it?”
“A woman I used to live with lives inside the internet. We still live in the same city. I go around the streets looking for her, but each time I catch a glimpse, she slips around the pixelated corners. A black scarf, a yellow shoe, a thread of yellowed silver hair mucking up the perfect blue pool of frozen sidewalk gunk.”
Poetry |
“Praying inside the emergency”
“I pray because // I can’t bend social orders / let alone my own diminutive life / to my will, and I have bent so hard / that I broke myself …”
Poetry |
“MMXX”
“From their scrubbed and bleached / houses, children peer through fingered sunblinds / at all the stony statesmen and sovereigns / falling down …”
Essay |
“The Nearness of Falling”
“A scientist claims that the increased stress of our modern life may be withering the hippocampus. During depression, it seems to shrink, contracting from the drought of optimism.”
Poetry |
“Poem Obscured By Sleep and Fog,” “After the Children Have Grown” & “One Kind of Waiting”
“Her biology homework is done, diagrams of cell walls drawn in purple ink. Soon enough, she carries her backpack into the darkness, into the fog, past the field which wants nothing, not even sun on its lovely slim grasses …”
Poetry |
“The Sutton Hoo Helmet”
“Behold its seams all split. Behold / the human shape that any head might fit.”