The Sharma family’s trip to Bombay didn’t go well. The Royal Nepal Airlines plane started acting funny after half an hour—a strange sound choked the left wing, and the plane began to hiccup—so they had to land in Patna, where the passengers were forced to stay in a hotel for the night. The mishap would…
In Spain I never rode the Talgo. The Talgo was the express train from Barcelona to Paris, but I never went to Barcelona. This was years before the Olympics, and Franco was finally dead. The white gorilla was still around and all the Gaudi, but I never made it there. Partly it was the expense….
Donald Hall recommends Eastern Mountain Time, poems by Joyce Peseroff: “These poems are local and universal, intimate accounts of landscape and people—with an almost pervasive shadow of elegy. In ‘The Ridge’ she makes a tableau of the dead, from a friend to a father. Always loss is mixed with joy, especially in the natural world—no…
By perspective, I meant how eventually every landscape wouldn’t have to include defilement, or any other outrage, getting smaller each time we looked back on it, or forgot not to. An armload of millet and sunflowers could, despite the fact of July, just like that, turn the room October. I believed suffering happened…
Walking through Kevin Young’s house outside of Boston is like taking a physical journey through his poetry. Something of a collector, he’s filled his home with old books and photographs, contemporary art, vinyl records, and other cultural memorabilia. "I’m a pack rat," says Young. "I keep everything." It started when he was a kid, collecting…
Three times she bit the Atlantic but only once barked at thunder. Lonely thunder and now her teeth-marks float to sea. This is her first trip to how Ocracoke Island smells and the ocean, I’ll count my encounters with the wide, ineffable appetite as I go to bed, with the factory of liquid fold and…
A missing tooth and a fang. A bloom and a sandstorm. A love letter and a trapdoor. A can opener and a kiss. A maraca and a spear. Lowered eyes and a suddenly somewhat disconcerting blow job. A baroque flute flourish and an eerie silence just beyond the cabin door. A tube top and…
Snow like the cold lard of falling stars strikes the windshield. A small thermos of tea rolls around in the glove compartment. I sneeze. Up in the black trees, the moon and the snow are repeatable in the long spine of a woman who has opened her high window. It is her signal to the…
The world is not limited to literature. I was sitting in the Adirondack chair when it floated by. Mother and Father were on the other side of the lot building a wall out of small pleasantly shaped rocks. I came to them and said, “It’s in front of us,” the sun burning like an absence….
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