Poetry |
“Replay,” “Things We Believe as Children” and “The Séance”
“My spilled-milk / dress spreads around me / and does anyone send a net out / to catch me, to pull me to the surface?”
Fiction |
“Collaboration Incidents” and “Liz Phair, unexiled”
“Once, Beatriz had loved. Now she was transcended by the Paradise she privileged into an action that humans could not name. It made her whitehot, and everybody saw it.”
Poetry |
“Radical Domesticity”
Essay |
“How Poems Change Us”
“I think of a poem’s shifts or transitions as tectonic … gliding plates that adjust and change the ground one stands on but with the acceptance of an embrace.”
Poetry |
“These nocturnal voices in shrubs,” “Fig and orange trees,” “Heroic deeds,” “Distance fades” & “Homeland laid bare”
“Homeland laid bare / at the base of memory // From afar, its forsaken shadow that trails / up to the border of wandering …”
Essay |
“The Value of Fear: Why We Should Listen to Robert Frost During the Pandemic”
“Frost doesn’t write about overcoming fear. He writes about experiencing it and then making decisions based on the evidence.”
Poetry |
“Ferryboats”
“If you don’t like your story, drop it in, / and if the waves don’t smooth it clean, then nothing will: / sweeping off each broken word in salty swells …”
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.”