The ashtray was given as a wedding present to the young couple who later grew unhappy and died, but that was not the fault of any inanimate object. Made from crystal cut into pleasing shapes, it was held aloft by the bride, Flora, the day after the wedding. Already she thought she could see the…
If the dog were a cloud, he could run through blue pastures, and never catch his hair on a fence. He could leap at other clouds and they would not growl or bite. He could retrieve the sun, which would glow in his mouth, and light up all his teeth. And how pleased his mistress…
Dobby Gibson’s poems are remarkable for their enactment of thought. Even at their most associational, there is always a syntax of argument at work which lends his sometimes serpentine sentences forceful momentum. Even when he’s flying by the seat of his pants, there’s a splendid sense of a presiding, living intelligence. —Dean Young, author of…
from Inheritance When she was thirty-four, no longer a young woman, my grandmother Chanyi crossed West Lake to see a fortuneteller. She didn’t tell my grandfather; she wished to keep her fate a secret. Perhaps her years of married life had deepened her need for privacy. “You come along, Junan,” she told my mother. “She’ll…
The job was pushing a rod. Steel rod in a V-channel with a stick. With a stick pushing a rod against a wheel. Which spinning ground the rod. Which screaming made sparks which bit my skin. Pushing a rod with a stick while being bitten by sparks was the job. Which required breath at the…
What I find unusual in Alissa Valles’s poems is a very strong expression of intellectual passion invested into the historical—or strictly personal—world. Her poetry is coming close to a kind of a "dynamic wisdom" maybe best exemplified in poems like "Two Gods." I think there’s an exceptional promise in her work, in her spiritual energy….
Transparent as a think-tank fantasia, my dream of April expands its empire without resentment, dissolving all estrangements into an intimacy that makes a god out of difference, equating Madonna Ciccone’s torment on Biography with Blake’s engravings of the Inferno— an amalgam of awe and abhorrence at times beatifying the damned. Next week the secret life…
I was reading the Hindu epic The Ramayana. It was spring in North Carolina: the birds fabricating their nests while I was dipping myself like a tea bag over and over in my own despair. What I like about The Ramayana is how each character suspects there is more than they know to the story….
This special Emerging Writers issue features forty poets and ten fiction writers who have yet to publish a full-length book, nominated by authors who have. When we put out a call for submissions to the issue, our hope was that writers who had already established their literary careers would be inclined to help others get…
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