I. Ancient Playground I’m standing idly by while Denis or “Dino” McCarthy (him of the wire-rimmed specs and the hair like a set of loosening springs) unzips his army pants, extracts his penis, and pisses stoutly into Chuck Gilheany’s brown quart bottle of flattening Bud. He sleeps for now but soon will wake and…
Katherine, Katherine, Katherine, Katherine. Black hair, small cold eyes, whom you loved. Cocktease Katherine, chewer of souls. The door blew open and she blew in, a ghoul. Black air, small cold wind, taking everything. Fish-eater Katherine, whose nails dig blood. I’m going to call her pinch-cunt, pickle-lip piss-dribble, shit-smear, goat’s-meat breath. I want to throw…
Madeline DeFrees, Double Dutch, poems: A limited-edition chapbook of DeFrees’s poems that has been published in honor of this esteemed writer’s eightieth birthday. (Red Wing)
Mr. Tao had outlived his wife but that didn’t bother him, he always said. In time he would catch up to her in heaven. Each day he waited calmly in his chair. The winter light moved square by square across the tile floor. On Friday afternoons when I came by he looked at me through…
At my father’s request I went into the city to ask for the Senator’s daughter’s hand. But she said she would not have me, nor any man. It was, I thought, a great pity: she was not only wealthy, but very pretty. So I told her that I would stand on the spot of earth…
Jay Neugeboren, Transforming Madness: New Lives for People Living with Mental Illness, nonfiction: In 1997, novelist Neugeboren delivered a moving and important memoir, Imagining Robert, about his mentally ill brother. Now Neugeboren examines the mental health care system as a whole, giving us a comprehensive, dramatic, and richly textured survey of failures and successes. (Morrow)
Powder rises from a compact, platters full of peppermints, a bowl of sour pudding. A cup of milk before me tastes of melted almonds. It is the story of the eve in which I begin. Gifts for me: boxes of poppies, pocket knife, an elaborate necklace made of ladybugs. My skirt rushing north There…
1. Where water meets water, where rain hangs lead-heavy for days before finally deciding to harden and fall, where the nearest road is sixty miles away and that a narrow track of gravel, where the lake is as still as a photograph and has never been photographed, where the trout return in accordance with a…
Joyce Peseroff, Mortal Education, poems: Peseroff’s third book of poems recalls the raw experience of mortality, met through the illness and death of a friend, the context of history, and the tensions and pleasures of family life. Carnegie Mellon has also reissued Peseroff’s The Hardness Scale as part of its Classic Contemporary Series. In Ploughshares,…
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