Confetti lifts over the fairground. Happy music, played to make us happy, slows its parade, dims as it pivots at the curb. While I hide in the copse, the outlines lighten, my skeleton, luminescent. I take the thick cup in both hands, drink urgently. Warm wind plays litter across the yard. My company’s shattered glass,…
August 25. I’ve really had very little chance to pick up this notebook in the three weeks since I took up my new duties in this village with the unpronounceable name of Asvestohori. My group is officially assigned the task of distributing medical supplies to our troops quartered here and the task of supervising the…
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,…
Beautiful from the get-go, we were Incarnations of the new, and pure sex. I’ll miss that, along with the unicorns. The organic bower of our garden grew Into anybody’s memory of a bed Or a mattress, in a shack near a lake. “Mistakes, like love, are to be made,” You said. I hadn’t thought of…
He says, You have to know, huh? Well, I listen to it because I can’t stumble into bliss, Can’t kill myself with sugar. It makes my head hurt, she says. I feel plugged into a box of wires Dangling loose. Sampled rigmarole In a gallery of Donatien Alphonse François. He sits in the booth Beside…
Robert Pinsky, Americans’ Favorite Poems: An anthology of poems that were nominated for the Favorite Poem Project, the centerpiece of Pinsky’s Poet Laureateship. Americans from all walks of life were invited to recommend their favorite poems, and thousands have responded with impassioned personal letters, some of which are excerpted here alongside the poems. This anthology…
Staunton, Virginia But what you should concentrate on is my homesickness. All these roadmaps, tickets, thing-in-a-glass-case— What could make you homesick, for what drive until you glimpsed an end? Look: here they have a little Pilgrim village, a little farming lot, a small extravaganza of skirmishes. EVERY HOUR, WEATHER WILLING, the Indians appear, run around,…
It slipped my wrist, vanished in the street dark with steps of no one I know, and late, and late. Picked up, dropped in a stranger’s pocket where the hours, yours, mean nothing but kept time. I never asked whether you wore it then, crossing the street when a car flung out of the rain….
Jane Shore, Happy Family, poems: Shore’s latest volume follows the arc of her life from childhood in a closely knit Jewish family in 1950’s New Jersey to her marriage and parenthood. In humorous, earthy verse, she bridges together experiences in the lives of women in ways both magical and profound. (Picador)
No products in the cart.