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?”
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.”
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.”
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 …”
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.”
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.”
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.”
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.”
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.'”