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  • The Errand

    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…

  • Transforming Madness: New Lives for People Living with Mental Illness by Jay Neugeboren

    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)

  • Origin and Ash

    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…

  • Trout Quintet

    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…

  • Mortal Education by Joyce Peseroff

    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,…

  • Balkan Journal, 1944

    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…

  • Goodbye to the Orchard

    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…