When I was young I used to go to museums with my father in the city where he worked. At the time I didn’t know how to look at art for myself, so often instead of looking at the paintings I just looked at him. I had no idea how art developed and concluded in…
Spring 2009 meena alexander‘s poetry includes Illiterate Heart, winner of the PEN Open Book Award, Raw Silk, and Quickly Changing River. She is editor of Indian Love Poems, and of the forthcoming Poetics of Dislocation (Michigan, 2009). She is Distinguished Professor of English at Hunter College and the Graduate Center, CUNY. sinan antoon…
After my mother died, I needed a word to describe how I felt. When I couldn’t find one, I realized that what I needed was not so much a word, as a sound, a sob, or maybe even a howl, a noise only the other motherless could hear, and come running. If I couldn’t find…
In addition to all these I can remember that Faustina O’Brien came there at least once and the Baedeker girls and young Brewer, who had his nose shot off in the war, and Mr. Albrucksburger and Miss Haag, his fiancée, and Ardita Fitz-Peters and Mr. P. Jewett, once head of the American Legion, and Miss…
A few weeks ago, Kathryn Harrison confessed to me that she "never considered writing nonfiction" when she began her literary career nearly twenty years ago. And had I not first seen her in 1997 at a party filled with book and magazine editors whispering about her then—forthcoming, mysterious memoir The Kiss, which would hit the…
On a motorcycle, a dash to the grocery store takes on epic proportions. It requires armor: you pull on stiff black boots; zip yourself into a thick leather jacket with kevlar plates at the shoulder and elbow; squeeze into your helmet, buckle the chinstrap; pull on long leather gloves with hard knuckles. Hazards abound: cars…
In the summer of 1991, I was on the beach in Los Angeles. I should have been home in New York, caring for sick friends, but I had won a grant and fled a boyfriend and I was living for a few months with two friends in Hollywood. One afternoon we went to Santa Monica,…
He thumbs a corner of Verlaine, plucks those pages like a dulcimer, even when the train lurches not looking up from there but pawing at the air for a handhold, and my God! what a head— stamped from some stuff…
From White Out , a memoir “Sir, in my heart there was a kind of fighting That would not let me sleep.” -Hamlet My Dad puts the gun in my hands. The barrel is cold. Cold like a rock you lay across in winter before it snows. But it’s autumn now. The trees all around…
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