Literature in Translation |
“Bulletin and Elegy of the Mitas”
“To Melchor Pumaluisa, son of Guápulo, / whose testicles they severed with a butcher knife / on the hacienda’s patio. / And kicking him, they made him walk / before our tear-filled eyes. / He erupted from the blows in jets of blood.”
Essay |
“Facing It”
“I used a heavy, faux-bone-handled butter knife to knock along the spine, dislodging even more unidentifiable, frangible stuff. Still there was something rattling around inside …”
Poetry |
“Phantom State” & “About the Pen”
“My brother is bent / over a computer 204 miles away. / Rootlessness is not so much a betrayal / as it is a logical extension, my father / shouts. Of what? I ask. I can’t hear his / answer.”
Essay |
“A Feast Afloat”
“Aboard our family’s 35-foot Ohlson yawl, Carousel, my mother was St. George to the alcohol stove’s dragon. She fought valiant battles to light it, at times igniting billows of blue flame and shrieking and cursing at it like the true salt she was.”
Poetry |
“Provenance,” “Fugue” & “Fin du Monde”
“Theirs, a brief effusion, brief as these words: / experience, memory, perception, exchanged / for chronic interconnectedness, surveillance, / former democratic rule turned demagoguery.”
Poetry |
“The Gulls (The Eagle)”
“There was a choice I had to make and I made it. And sometimes I think the // voice in my head tells me I didn’t make it. That everyone else made the choice, and I floated / instead like a gull over the surface of its water …”
Essay |
“Hand With Head”
“Art’s development, like culture in general, is anchored in a system of interconnected realities none of which is fully controlled and explained by rationality and linear causality.”
Poetry |
“Remainders”
“When my mother died / twenty-seven years / of appointment books / sat in her closet, / each errand noted / and checked off once done …”
Literature in Translation |
“Belgium,” “Patterns,” “Poland,” “Hooligan” & three untitled poems
“A young girl is embroidering in her chamber. / On the canvas, patterns of spears and crosses. / The girl stitches dead soldiers on a meadow / With red flowers on their chests.”
Poetry |
“The Nine Children of Mariana Gluza”
“what does it mean if your family / erases you as a child was the grief of your death / too much to bear or were you replaceable”
Poetry |
“Go On, Then,” “Fire” & “Vanishing Points”
“One of these days, Alice! / roared from the screen on weekend poker nights / while Connor or Cooney or Burke was riffling the cards. / In pajamas, we slid our faces through the staircase bars.”
Literature in Translation |
“Attenborough”
“I imagine how nice it would feel to cool off in the aquarium installed for the penguins and have a dip in the ice-cold water of the pool whose glass wall lets you observe the tiniest movements up close. “
Interview |
A Dialogue with Arne Weingart on Concentration
“It’s the built-in problem of the political poem, to find the comfortably uncomfortable place between certainty and doubt, outrage and resolution … I think we’re all shocked and disoriented by how quickly the horrors of the previous century seem to be circling back to us, as if on a demented carousel.”
Poetry |
“Notes on Recovery”
“I lowered her into her chair / and she kissed my hands again // and again, lips like paper / drinking the last of our story.”
Essay |
“On Naive and Sentimental Poetics: an Introduction, with reference to Rachel Blau DuPlessis”
On Naive and Sentimental Poetics: an Introduction, with Reference to Rachel Blau DuPlessis I don’t know how to write about poetry. That’s where I begin. I write poems, but I’ve never been what’s called a “poet-critic.” And I do write something resembling scholarship, but my scholarly work has never been about poetry. So, I…