Featured Essay |
“Soap: Art of Failure”
“What if instead of saying we have failed we say that we are failuring? What if a practice of imagination is often also a practice of failure?”
January/February 2025 Edition
Literature in Translation |
“This Loss”, “Words at the Entrance to Jerusalem,” “Luckily,” “Labyrinths” &
“So difficult, this loss: / to imagine your pages / are those of a dead man, / and that death’s colleagues / are the ones / consoling you now.”
Commentary |
on Take My Name but Say It Slow, essays by Thomas Dai
“How do you identify yourself when traditional modes of identification, right down to your very name, are troubled? Take My Name is essentially a catalogue of the methods, all imperfect, that Dai has chosen.”
Poetry |
“Pilgrims” & “Postcard”
“This is a cross-state / drive of faded billboards, endless sagebrush, // crowded rest stops and unemployed landmarks, / a countryside the boy quietly grows to accept, // until they reach the first signs of city life …”
Literature in Translation |
“B’s Grave,” “September 18, 1953” & “February 21, 1954”
“The past comes and walks by your side once more. / Don’t change your heart, don’t be charmed. / Don’t linger, take leave of the time …”
Fiction |
“Versions of Miriam”
“What would it be like to spend an entire night here, not waiting for anyone? The thought edged plausibility. If she was lonely and looking for a place to drive and feel unbothered, this would be the place.”
Second Looks |
Revisiting Shirt In Heaven by Jean Valentine
“I was carrying a copy of Shirt in Heaven, Jean Valentine’s final collection of poetry, on one of the last evenings I saw her. It was 2017 and she was reading at Yale’s Beinecke Library.”
Commentary |
on Is Art History?: Selected Writings by Svetlana Alpers
“Alpers is at home with theory but prefers to stand in awe before Vermeer and Velázquez, absorbing, one-on-one, larger questions of chronology and technique.”
Poetry |
“Young Widowhood (ending in the ICU)” & “Monitors”
“Your usual grief is thick, pervasive, oozing / over everything, but tonight it’s erratic, an itchy // tag that scrapes your waist and some days you think of him / less …”
Commentary |
on I Don’t Care, stories by Ágota Kristóf, translated from the French by Chris Andrews
“Many of the stories grapple with the question posed in Kristóf’s memoir: ‘What would my life have been like if I hadn’t left my country? More difficult, poor, I think, but also less solitary, less torn. Happy, maybe.'”
Literature in Translation |
“An Obituary for Roman”
“I called upon all residents of Omsk who follow me on social media to contact the fitness club where Roman was working and demand his firing for threatening women. My request went far and wide — tens of thousands of reposts, scores of news items in major media.”
Commentary |
on Asian/Other: Life, Poems, and the Problem of Memoir by Vidyan Ravinthiran
“Ravinthiran offers us another metaphor of selfhood, and a new kind of autobiography, one for a late capitalist world in which we must think of global priorities and of selves that exceed national borders.”
Commentary |
Book Notes: Novels — on I’ll Come To You by Rebecca Kauffman, Paradise Close by Lisa Russ Spaar & Blue Light Hours by Bruna Dantas Lobato
“I’ll Come To You is a record of how Kauffman enacted her approach to a mystery – what do people actually want from each other, and what gets in the way of providing or receiving it?”
Fiction |
“The Rock of Ephyra”
“The rock was beginning to understand that each day would be different, each day bringing subtle changes in the experience of being rolled up the hill and released to forge new trails.”
Poetry |
“Eleanor Remembers”
“It was the kind of town where if your neighbors / saw you walking, they assumed you’d lost your license — / too many DUIs — or your car, too many payments // missed.”
Poetry |
“Metal Rat,” “ism” & “Astonished”
“These husks of civic duty. These masks dissolved to the bone beneath. / This hand over a mouth. Over a million mouths. Over // infinite mouths open for a scream so long in coming it sparked / the ancient seas to life.”
Commentary |
on Past Lives, poems by V. Joshua Adams
“When the ‘I’ appears in Adams’ poems, it’s not to offer the stamp of emotional authenticity, but to take advantage of the many masks that a skilled raconteur can adopt.”
Essay |
“Fairfield”
“But there was something in the dirt, in the water, my mom’s cousin Troy said — a toxic fallout that made its way into the bodies of the people.”
Second Looks |
“Juan Rulfo’s Pedro Páramo Reconsidered”
“The erasure between the lyric and narrative drives is something I aspired to achieve in my own work, but it wasn’t until I read Rulfo’s novel that I learned how to do it.”
Poetry |
“Greater Scope” & “Working After Dark”
“And we also know how birdlike we are, / enchanted in every entrapment / by the promise of a clear escape …”
Poetry |
“Very Long Marriage at Bedtime,” “Not One; Not Two,” & “Negativity Bias”
“I lift the branch, and the ant resumes its task. I pass an enormous anthill teeming with movement. Someone has placed a plastic straw in an opening and the ants tunnel out, landing in a heap on top of each other.”
Commentary |
on Poems That Dance and A Gaze Hound That Hunteth by the Eye by V. Penelope Pelizzon
“We talk about art embodying ideas and feelings, but I think it’s worth talking about poems — some poems, at least — as bodies unto themselves, bodies a mind can make …”
Commentary |
Book Notes, Nonfiction: on The Cities We Need by Gabrielle Bendiner-Viani, What Nails It by Greil Marcus, The Picture Not Taken by Benjamin Swett & The Age of Reconstruction by Don H. Doyle
“She observes neighborhood life and the diverse work of housing activists, artists, community gardeners, small business owners who stimulate our thinking about and cultivate the gratifications of dailiness.”
Poetry |
“A Burrow”
“Some would say this is no life at all, / but how could that be, / when all of my life is / eternally present?”
Essay |
“Bad Faith, Obsession, and Guns: on Reading Lady Wing Shot by Sara Moore Wagner”
“Whereas I’ve spent my life avoiding guns, Wagner faces them straight on. As it turns out, both of us had something to learn from Annie Oakley: ‘She knew to not look at the gun, but at the thing, / to point at what you wanted until it fell / at your feet.'”
Poetry |
“Remember the Red River Valley”
“At least he won’t feel the wind, still / blowing cold in May or the rusty hinge / call of the Prairie Larks. His father lies by his side.”
Commentary |
on The Widow’s Crayon Box, poems by Molly Peacock
“As much as this collection reflects upon lives shared over decades past, it also looks forward with curiosity, understanding that the ‘scent of lost affection, / is what gives loneliness its worth.'”
Poetry |
“The Web,” “Unadorned Air” & “An Eye Under a Hundred Tons of Earth”
“Put / My boat in air, my oar through. / I’m // Damp in the heart. I’m a rotted / Knot. / The past is what I’ll grovel over // Until I can kill the air of wishes.”
Poetry |
“Bonfire of the Cryptobourgeoisie” & “Doves and Roses”
“The group around the bonfire / fires off bon mots, their laughter / raucous, covetous, spiteful. // They hedged their bets and lost …”
Commentary |
on The Burrow, a novel by Melanie Cheng
“Cheng unveils the devastating consequences of grief on a family in the Australian suburbs during the Covid pandemic … a nuanced exploration of family dynamics amidst loss and the enduring power of hope.”
Commentary |
on The Lady of the Mine, a novel by Sergei Lebedev, translated from the Russian by Antonina W. Bouis
“A washer woman dies in a mining village in the Donbas, Ukraine in July of 2014, and two days later a foreign passenger jet is blown out of the sky. In the novel’s mystical world, these seemingly unrelated events acquire the force of world-shattering causality.”
Poetry |
“There”
“The left foot, yours — that scar from the bone spur — / the belly was yours. How were you not there? // The snow was falling. It just kept on falling.”
Poetry |
“Childhood Suite”
“Her lipstick: unapologetic / crimson. Lacquered hollyberries on the Christmas / brooch pinned each year to the collar / of her winter coat. Patterned red apron, / in the yellow kitchen.”
Poetry |
“Time Is Distance” & “Confession”
“… They were ugly / And cheap and we bought them / When we were poor / And it is now so easy to let them / Go not because we are / Rich but because we have no / Heart for what we no / longer desire.”