for Robert Philen I saw all these things the moment contained (what the light proposed), a camellia bush in thick red bloom all January, some flowers browning on the dormant lawn (still green): they smelled like something afternoon; wax baskets of evergreen mistletoe hung from bare limbs of a southern red oak, verdant parasite on…
It’s really cold in here now, easily forty below something, and half the class is asleep. Snow dazzles in the windows, makes a cake of each desk. It’s really cold in here now. I’ve been lecturing on the same poem for twenty-six hours and half the class is asleep. I want them to get it….
translated by José Edmundo Ocampo Reyes No matter how much he pondered the Virgin’s pregnancy, how much his thoughts went back and forth, his heart and troubled soul couldn’t figure it out. —traditional Filipino verse narrative of the life and death of Christ Chisel, plane, and hammer, to you I’ll whisper my bitter…
Something in this long commute is chilling. The street between Karlin and Nessen City’s broken, carnage is literal and fresh: raccoon, a deer new since yesterday, crow, loose feathers desultory in the jet stream of a car. This afternoon a mallard looks more human in death than he ever did bobbing on a pond: face-down,…
It only wanted to say everything at once, it would pull the very moment out of reach, it blessed the muskrat among rusted reeds gliding ahead of the shimmering geese and goslings— it was in how their caliper wakes broadened out, how the pond then zippered shut, in all that surface, in all the glittering…
It was January, I’d hardly seen anyone for days, you understand. The sheep were all sitting separate and silent, a hard wind was coming in over the hill, a white moon floated. I’d bought the pumpkin for soup. My arms had dropped with the weight of it, dropped and come back, like the bounce back…
Although the virtuosity of her prose announces her as a serious author indeed, Amy Bloom is too sensible—and too funny—to get carried away with herself. A relative latecomer to the art, Bloom has written two acclaimed story collections, a novel, and a book of nonfiction essays; she contributes to top-drawer magazines, including The New Yorker,…
You’ve made me your horse, and I don’t mind. When you leave town at midnight, debts unpaid and a hard wind lifting the dust out of your hair, I’ll take up new habits: whistling, chewing my nails. Bank robbery’s not so bad when you think about it. Outside my window the pin oak hisses and…
I feel as if we opened a book about great ocean voyages and found ourselves on a great ocean voyage: sailing through December, around the horn of Christmas and into the January Sea, and sailing on and on in a novel without a moral but one in which all the characters who died in the…
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