In northwestern Montana once, I met a person who changed my mind. This well-published and respected writer had moved to that frontier university town, to teach a four-four load, and to be, I suppose, left the hell alone. The English departments of frontier colleges (I once taught in such a place) are often staffed by…
Picture a city and the survivors: from their windows, some scream. Others walk the wreckage: blood and still more blood coming from the mouth of a girl. This is the same movie playing all over the world: starring everybody who ends up where the action is: lights, cameras, close-ups: that used to be somebody’s leg….
My father always said he was a betting man and that his first love was gambling. Dice and cards, not sports or cars, not girls. Curbside on the gritty Depression-era streets of Providence, Rhode Island, he honed this practice rolling dice against the gutter or shuffling cards with the grace and speed of a magician….
Some mornings I try to remember: what is the name of the famous hockey defenseman for the Boston Bruins who, in the last few years of his 22-year career, played for the Colorado Avalanche and who, in his last year of play, was part of a Colorado team that won the Stanley Cup? Ray Bourque….
A waxing moon, tail-wind of a return, but to what? Life on the telephone, letters typed on a computer screen which no one needs to file or hide or burn at the storm-center of emergency where there is no coherent narrative. With no accounting of my hours to give black holes gape open in my…
I am a child of a Confessor, born in 1956, the same year the McCarthyesque Chinese Confession Program was sanctioned. Its purpose, simply put, was to seek and flush out Chinese—arriving or already landed—who held derivative citizenships. America began with an open door policy that admitted everyone but "lepers, prostitutes, and morons." The Chinese were…
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…
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