Fiction |
“Incandescent Obsolescence”
“But our life expectancies hover around 203. More than enough time for an average of four twenty-year marriages with a full gender array of spouses — organic and AI — with the final decades of our lives whiled away on the well-appointed Archipelago of the Old, wrinkle-free and comfortably numb …”
Poetry |
“The Underworld” & “Mudman”
“I press on through the half-light, reaching // at last the crossing where she’s kept. Amber / light projects her number on the plinth. // Make no mistake. This is the one you seek …”
Poetry |
“Screenshot”
“My last few wisps of faith / are history, and sorry not sorry // I knew it was coming when / grown-ass adults gathered at dusk // in the cul-de-sac to break down / cardboard boxes.”
Poetry |
“The Window / Nine Attempts”
“Then all day it shifts and lengthens, pools and stops short, pours itself out, / ripples like water over shoals, // like your fingertip / tracing down my keel. // I mean breastbone.”
Literature in Translation |
from A Gap in Time
“today i held / a seminar on surgery / online / we discussed thyroid cancer / where are those sufferers now? / recently / we’ve had hellishly good luck / since the bridge was blown up / our village / is no longer of importance to the military”
Interview |
“The Miraculous Recompense of Language”: a Conversation with Lisa Russ Spaar
“On the poetic spectrum of transparent to obdurate, I’m hanging out with Plath and Dickinson and Hopkins on the difficult end. But I always try to include quotidian, vernacular, or pop cultural detail — in image, sound, allusion — to give the reader a place to buy in to the poem.”
Poetry |
“Long Exposure”
“Love what you’ve never seen: encircling sphere / of icy shards beyond the heliopause, / too small, too faint, too far to be much more // than theoretical.”
Essay |
“When I Get Botox I Think of Bees”
“It’s in my blood, migraine: in the genetic messages encoded in my cells — inherited flips switched, triggers tripped — inevitable. In the inextricable link between my headaches and monthly bleeds.”
Literature in Translation |
“The Stranger,” “Nobody” & “He Can”
“… the mere presence / of his breathing / in this world is poison. / He can have a sky and a road / sewn out of doves and roses.”
Essay |
“Rearranging Max Eastman’s Library”
“My task was straightforward: to create some kind of order that would render this collection usable again for faculty members staying there for fellowships or research leaves, while also sorting out items that shouldn’t be there.”
Poetry |
“The transmigration of souls in the donut shop”
“The baker is making a mobius strip of lemon cream. It darts through the crowd. / The ballooning heart of the construction worker is being sawed in two / by the manager.”
Fiction |
“The Reading Lamp”
“At the end of the hallway, I could hear sounds of excited voices speaking in loud tones behind a blue painted door. This was the voice, if I was to believe my assignment, of the person who was said to be the greatest reader of literature in the world.”
Essay |
“Better Not to Say: Apology in Poetry”
“The present cultural moment in the US does not seem receptive to the inevitability of discomfort as it pertains to living with one another and of letting each other move on, or get on, with their lives … there is always someone looking to hold another to account and/or demand them to apologize publicly.”
Poetry |
from On Dangerous Ground: Film Noir Poems
“Poetry and film noir both often rely on set formats, manipulate narrative coherency, and proceed by implication. As for the doomed film noir protagonist, it is not unusual for him, and it is usually him, to have the temperament of a thwarted poet …”
Poetry |
“The Known Consequence of Living” & “Defining or Defying Gravity”
“In the hierarchy of all I don’t know / about the world, invisible force / is in the upper echelons. / I should have leaned harder / into geology or biology / or archeology for rocks / & blood & bones to touch.?