Literature in Translation |
“To Whom It May Concern: On a Poet’s Development”
“Dozens of poetry books could be published without the authors’ names on the cover, because the composers of these books, in essence, are not really authors, but weak-willed mediums of a mode, school or tendency.”
Poetry |
“In memory of always forgetting,” “Pallaksch” & “Copia”
“And a different missing grandfather, / profession pharmacist, / handing his wife Rose a knife and saying — ‘Finish the Job.’ / Anecdote absolute. No before or after.”
Essay |
“Walking, Then Finding Home”
“… every road to school was haunted by the ‘eve-teasers.’ Young men in flared pants, with wavy hair bobbing behind their ears, who leered and jeered at, followed and, at times, assaulted girls with impunity.”
Literature in Translation |
from Lojman
“Selma grabbed the razor from Görkem’s hand. She pressed it against the green cord coming out of the baby’s belly and connecting to something mysterious inside her. In one deft motion, she slashed the cord. She took a piece of twine from her pocket and tied the end.”
Poetry |
“Origin Story,” “Eve” & “To life”
“maybe that’s why // you bloomed in all the wrong ways. you know / the kind of girl you were, the crow growls. // the kind to swallow a rotten apple whole.”
Essay |
“On Arrangement”
“Poetry gave me logics that were affective, associative, metaphorical, linguistic, material, alive to mixed emotions. Its patterns brought me toward things like thoughts. Its thinking wasn’t narrowly systematic. It was systemic.”
Fiction |
“After School Special”
“Because of its location in the back of a mostly evacuated mini-shopping strip, The Falls was always close to empty — the perfect rendezvous point for students joined in something, Liza put it as ‘beyond mere cliquishness.'”
Literature in Translation |
from All Before the Night
“Blind to your destiny / your hand holding your hand, you go off / into the abyss of knowledge.”
Poetry |
“[Sometimes I’ll make a new friend and they may ask about my history]” & “Canada Trip”
“… It was cigarettes over electric bills. / It was one of us. It was both of us. It was one couldn’t drive / and one couldn’t budget.”
Poetry |
“Sunk Cost Fallacy” & “Winter the Rain”
“… you suffer without me, / who, sleeveless in the heat / of July’s last morning, / will be squeezing plums / in produce when your eldest / calls to say, “Dad’s / taking his last breath.”
Essay |
“Preservations”
“A lifelong binge drinker, he’d lost jobs, wrecked a car, punched holes in the wall of his house, but what had made my grandmother throw him out for good was stealing the three silver dollars my mother had won in an eighth grade essay writing contest.”
Poetry |
“Jericho, Oxford” & “Ektopia”
“… we settled in the end for the pure girl face / that I turned to consider the street / down which the boy and the men had gone / in search of bookshops and better drugs.”
Poetry |
“Have You Been Watching the News?”
“Every time I look at the dog, I remember she is going to die. / Sometimes I cry while picking her shit up from the yard with a plastic claw. / Next week she will turn one.”
Literature in Translation |
“Atlas” & “Y2K”
“No aircraft appears in this photograph. Instead, a mountain of trash bins overflowing in the background. Empty tuna cans, coffee filters, dirty diapers, used needles, cattle bones.”
Poetry |
“My Father for the First Time,” “Death, Second Person,” “Summer Wind Up” & “The Tempest”
“He practiced flamboyant grudges, drive-by / destruction. And yet I imagined he’d forgive. / Death can do that. You forget, you reconcile.”