The shame of an idea is in its seriousness, a conqueror’s seriousness, shameful the way it surveys the landscape of remains, laying claim to the vast ruined view and each surviving privacy alike, claiming its own pure force as the origin of things, seizing even the moonlight on the leaves of half a…
That summer I saw you as a bird, a whitethroat singing O Sweet Canada Canada but a strange sooty color, then as the dwarf peach that had never borne ruddy with hanging fruit, actually bedecked like a Christmas tree. Everything promised transformation, day into night, stars unrolling like an opera score for owls, crickets, and…
Yusef Komunyakaa, Pleasure Dome, poems: A compelling twelfth collection that gathers work from the past twenty years, as well as some new and previously uncollected work. Publishers Weekly astutely predicts that readers will want this volume for its “heady mix of gothic foreboding, racial history and realpolitik, biblical and Attic allusion, and sexual longing.” (Wesleyan)
In one film, a man turning the pages of a book. In another film, a man turning the pages of a book. Outside, the snow and the semis cover everything with mud and someone talks to someone else. The snow creaks like an old floor. Inside, the paper weighs the same as the inside of…
Hall as Young Artist Approaching his mid-seventies, Donald Hall is — as he frequently reminds people — an old man now. Yet the term old can encompass a long shelf life, and no American writer has done more to honor the reality of time and generation than has Donald Hall. He’s given detail, definition, and…
Al Young, The Sound of Dreams Remembered, poems: Containing nearly one hundred fifty poems from the past ten years, this volume serves as a playful, shrewd, hip, and occasionally shocking record of millennial America. (Creative Arts)
1. Savior The pustules on his back: volcanic almost in how they erupted, subsided, erupted. Closing my eyes, I would trace my fingertips along his skin, feeling the circular, hard shapes and slick, raised peaks. I wondered if they hurt when I touched him, how it felt to be so broken out, not only on…
Night sweats to the rattle and clink of their armor— marching grooves around my bed, pulling toothpicks from tatami to disembowel each other, or skewer and roast a beetle, fine bone china of their sake cups rolling the sound of marbles when they drop them on the hard- wood floors at dawn. You think I’m…
More Awards Our congratulations to the following writers, whose work has been selected for the following anthologies: Best Stories — Four stories from Ploughshares-a record number from a literary journal-will be among the twenty in The Best American Short Stories 2001: Claire Davis’s “Labors of the Heart,” from the Spring 2000 issue edited by Paul…
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