Ms. Maclay has a superb lyric gift, a remarkable imagistic clarity, and a constant sense of invention. Her recent prose poems—a departure for her—strike me as some of the most gracious and compelling of the genre. She is melding the concerns of her more fiercely lyric pieces with a more elongated music phrasing, and the…
I: I’d rather have a granddaughter who’s a whore than a grandson who’s a faggot like you. In the empty parking lot of St. Jude’s Church in Westchester, on a summer day, she lets go and falls to the gritty pavement while I pedal and pedal and glide without training wheels for the first time….
Then I wouldn’t prefer the California wine, its big sugar, big fruit rolling down my tongue, a cornucopia spilled across a tacky tablecloth. I’d prefer the French, its smoke and rot. Said Cézanne: Le monde—c’est terrible! Which means, The world—it bites the big weenie. People sound smarter in French. The Japanese prefer the crescent moon…
A poem is a room that contains the house it’s in, the way you accommodate me when I lie beside you, even if the address is lost so many times and the names of streets are strangers that pass shuffling a card-deck of maps whose rubber band has snapped: still beyond all chance or choice…
I’m proud to nominate Patrick Michael Finn, one of my most accomplished, prolific former students and one of my favorite writers. Mr. Finn remains someone I talk about quite often, though he graduated in 1997, and someone whose stories have never left my mind. I still remember his characters—lonely Joliet teenagers struggling with religion and…
Standing off a bit, I watch one of them fly out of its form, so clenched up on its own that it does not understand the wash, the river carved into its underground. When it is here or there, it is always somewhere else, an optic hop away from the housecat moving slowly towards the…
“I hate what I come from,” says my cousin Shoshana, 22, jawing per always, feather earrings tangling in her light brown hair. Shoshana hangs on to Kinesha, her kid, to stop her running off. Our cousin Deb’s wedding just got out; we’re standing at the bottom of the wedding hall steps. “White people don’t have…
I endorse with great enthusiasm the poems of Jaswinder Bolina. I firmly believe he is a poet whom we will be hearing about in the not-too-distant future. The foundations of his work are complex, and I will attempt to lay them out here. Clearly, one would deduce from reading these poems, here is someone who…
Helen Swann shivers in shirtsleeves at the bus stop, coatless and confident the day will warm. The city bus, as it lumbers toward her, cracks the ice that lines the gutter. Frost nubs its broad, bald forehead and clouds the immense windshield. Like glaucoma, Helen thinks. It’s one of the old buses, which means the…
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