Poetry |
“Exodus,” “Rubies,” “We Were Supposed to Share” & “Slowness”
“But I’m now tattered sliced / assaulted. / The gulls cry as if they miss / water yet it’s near. / What if you’re the water I miss?”
Poetry |
“Requiem,” “Breviary” & “Causa Sui”
“At the funeral mass, my father asked me to tie his tie. / A parishioner approached, and asked him who died. / My wife, he said, every word an elevation to climb.”
Poetry |
“Sometimes It’s Good to Stop Talking”
“I solved all the problems, all / the road blocks // to world peace, yesterday, while / under the influence // at the dentist.”
Literature in Translation |
“Beyond Time”
“Life descends, we can walk / The footstep illuminates / The immense fear of being oneself in time // Our two almond hands are steel gates // And, look, how all the love of forests was needed / To adopt the eyes of the invisible.”
Poetry |
“Self-Portrait as Sarcophagus with Nail File and Anger,” “The End” & “Body Language”
“It felt so stupid to be afraid / of you. Still does. / Thinking I would be safe / if I became the place to hide.”
Literature in Translation |
on Translating Robert Seethaler’s The Café With No Name, with an excerpt from the novel
“I’d like to see a more diverse field where people join the translation profession from many different backgrounds, rather than only via academia or publishing contacts.”
Poetry |
“Hotel-Dieu,” “Fine” & “The Mockingbird Was Doing the Jay”
?I’m addressing you, invader of my dream, / with your guns-and-God tattoo, your slow car // driving over the day lilies, circling back / to mock my lawn sign’s love …”
Essay |
“The Angry Estate Gardener” & “Exercise After a Long Flight”
“The gardener raged, rattled high-speed after the Porsche — in a pickup truck hitched to a trailer full of fertilizer. He pursued, but didn’t come close …”
Poetry |
“These are some of the poems I read today,” “I went to the museum and stood staring at a chicken,” “If only the cute nannies at the park would trade glances at me” & “In Alice Notley’s poem ‘I must have called and so he comes'”
“Then I sat reading a book about the women who clean / other people’s houses, written by one of the women / homeowners. I thought about how the world is divided / between the books you start to read and the ones you don’t.”
Poetry |
“unknown caller”
“the threads that tie you to this life will break / and break you / again and again you will remember the warmth / that resides in the garment is not the garment itself”
Essay |
“‘What burns through existence to endlessness?’ Dean Rader’s Poems on Cy Twombly”
“Death, the meaning of life and contact with that which defies naming are recurring leitmotifs … Rader approaches these themes with the help of the dialogical method of maieutics, which helps the interlocutor to gain knowledge through targeted questioning.”
Literature in Translation |
“new neo,” “[cutting away all difficult memories],” “[merged like rhyme, fire]” & “[who are you …]”
“you strike the month of february like a short match / punch the blue pill of tranquility from the foil packet / what was your name?”
Fiction |
“Notes From a Reunion”
“This was the same location where my parents ran a roadhouse that burned to the ground the year after we all graduated. My dad was in the midst of a mid-life crisis, at least that’s how he saw it.”
Poetry |
“Onset of Dusk at Wood’s Gulch” & “Some Nights”
“That dark’s too dark to measure distance true — / have you edged close to what I fear for you …”
Interview |
“The natural warmth of detritus”: David Lazar in Conversation on Stories of the Streets
“The fragments we shore against our ruin are consolations, at best.”