The Literary Boroughs series will explore little-known and well-known literary communities across the country and world and show that while literary culture can exist online without regard to geographic location, it also continues to thrive locally. Posts are by no means exhaustive and we encourage our readers to contribute in the comment section. The series will run on our blog…
My wife told me to lead with the woman peeing. So I will. It was 5:30 last Sunday morning and I watched a woman pee herself. She announced she was doing it. Mumbling something about fascists, she said she hated that the bathrooms were locked and then she pissed herself, through her underwear, and her…
I didn’t grow up in what I would call a literary family. We delivered newspapers; we didn’t read them. We told stories constantly, but we never wrote them down. My mom is a housekeeper. All her life she has never taken a sick day. No work meant no paycheck. Simple. Once, when visiting me at…
The Neruda Case Roberto Ampuero Riverhead, June 2012 352 pages $26.95 Pablo Neruda has a problem: he’s ancient and dying of cancer, but he yearns for an ex-lover who may—or may not—have given birth to a long-lost daughter. As he faces death (“the old woman with the scythe”) he enlists Cayetano Brulé, a hapless exiled…
The Literary Boroughs series will explore little-known and well-known literary communities across the country and world and show that while literary culture can exist online without regard to geographic location, it also continues to thrive locally. Posts are by no means exhaustive and we encourage our readers to contribute in the comment section. The series will run on our blog…
When I was nine my grandparents gave me a copy of Shel Silverstein’s Where the Sidewalk Ends, and I fell in love so completely with poetry, I told everyone that when I grew up I was going to be a rich and famous poet. Then in the seventh grade I took one of those career…
Narcopolis Jeet Thayil Penguin Press, April 2012 304 pages $25.95 It’s dangerous to look for the reincarnation of a classic novel in contemporary literature. Like a monk seeking the next in the line of a particular lama, I placed the various relics of Malcolm Lowry’s Under the Volcano before first time novelist Jeet Thayil’s Narcopolis,…
An Individual History Michael Collier W. W. Norton & Co., July 2012 80 pages $25.95 Dear Dr. Poetry, My father died when I was very young and I don’t remember him much. My mom told me that he died doing what he loved—rescuing children from burning buildings. But I recently found out that he worked…
When I sat down to write this piece—my last post for Ploughshares—I knew I wanted to bookend my stint as guest-blogger with another yoga/writing essay. I wanted to talk about writerly humility; specifically, how I’ve come to a better understanding of humility through Child’s pose. I figured I’d describe the pose first—face down, toes touching,…
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