Essay |
“Mirena”
“Thirty years later, here I lie with a blue-gloved OB-GYN between my legs, who clasps you by your polyethylene threads as if you were a two-hooked lure, and I, a big-game fish …”
Essay |
“Let Us Once Again Praise Creative Writing Workshops”
“For the aspiring poet and teacher of poetry, what better field placement can there be than assimilating the subtle, helpful, and uncompromising critiques of one’s own drafts, as well as one’s classmates’ drafts, by poets of rare accomplishment?”
Essay |
“Assembled”
“Chaos theory says that things are difficult to control, unpredictable. Sometimes, trauma can be a quiet, quick wave of a hand. Nearly undetectable … Sometimes, it is the sound of car doors slamming an end to the conversation.”
Essay |
“Trash”
“That afternoon, I wrote on the board: Lucille Clifton said she wanted to write a poetry that would comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable.”
Essay |
“The Tiny Thread of Milk”
“My own body briefly remembers what it cannot, a time before I tasted language or knew the parts of speech, in my earliest days of naps and waking at midnight and a belly full of milk.”
Essay |
“July, August” and “Maybe Tomorrow or the Day After”
“I’ve found many good books. A book on how to garden, circa 1970. A book on country drives to take and why you might. A book of the history of a little town nearby, the one with so many stone walls.”
Essay |
“Sitting for Mrs. Siegfried”
“Achieving those symmetrical pigtails meant sitting under the blow dryer, its shrieking motor barely muffling my mother’s expletives as she brushed my hair limp.”
Essay |
“It Was the Sound of a Cloud Looking at Itself” and “Thanks So Much for the Urn”
“When I was thirteen, my art teacher asked my mother if I had always been forty. She said, well, she spends a lot of time in the barn … “
Essay |
“The Coffee Klatsch,” “The Long Ride Home,” “Timeshare” and “Breathing Lessons”
“… and I’d have this nearly imperceptible fantasy while stirring the Sweet & Low into the matcha that I would cause an explosion, that our little corner of Brooklyn would suddenly burst into flames …”
Essay |
“Poetry”
“Instead of shouting at or attacking me, she reached up to pat me on the sleeve. ‘Listen, girlie’ she said. ‘I’ve lost my poems. I’ve looked and looked and I can’t find them. Will you help me?'”
Essay |
“The Fly in Blake, in Dickinson, in Marmalade”
“It seems precarious when Blake is invoked as a senior member of a dead poets society that insists on a tradition whose ‘coherent wholeness’ is no longer possible …”
Essay |
“A More or Less Imperfect World: Reading Merton in Modernity”
“What I long for in this world is an acknowledgment of practice. This is something I am still working on. What, I want to ask people, are you practicing?”
Essay |
“Small Animal Needs”
“Another story: A beautiful young woman smokes a bunch of pot one night and walks one across a four-lane highway with her little girl to the nearest rundown grocery store.”
Essay |
“In the Garden of Uncertainty”
“I tried to make peace with the fact that my body still had the upper hand, as there was no way to address whether a cancer cell from the original cluster of cells might have stowed away on a blood vessel bound for a distant port.”
Essay |
“The Explosion”
“Right after the explosion, the newspaper interviewed me. So did a lawyer. He was seeking damages on behalf of the victims. The newspaper article reported that I had run into the house, though I had only gone under the carport.”