I liked Gretchen better when she wasn’t trying to kill me. Here’s what she used: a Colt .38; a heavy-handled hatchet; a pair of powder-blue knitting needles (one in each ear, a quick thrust, and I’d be gonzo, Gretchen said); and a gleaming silver-tipped syringe, its cylinder filled with something thick and yellow. This was…
In the grand scheme of things, These words are smaller Than one pixel in a black And white photograph, A grain of sand, smaller Than molecules—no— Smaller than that. Zoom out, as in those old Science films in junior high, From one letter of one Of these words, out— To the room, above The house,…
Robert Pinsky, The Sounds of Poetry: A Brief Guide, nonfiction: Going far beyond mere prosody, Pinsky delivers a fascinating, instructive treatise on poetry, which he convincingly asserts is, above all, a “vocal” and “bodily” art. (FSG)
Murphy calls, says he wants to meet me down at the Chagrin River after work. “Fish and talk,” he says. I can hear machines in the background, people shouting. “When’s after work?” “Punching the clock now,” he says. “And?” “And I have a favor to ask.” I hang up, give the radio ten minutes to…
I brush aside a spider from my arm, but he returns to scale the mountain of my knee, scuttle across my book, over page 64, and off the edge. Disoriented, thwarted, he pauses in the grass, then drops down, swaying from the tip of a green blade. Swooping from one to the next, the afternoon…
Charles Simic, Jackstraws, poems: In his thirteenth collection, Simic sometimes experiments with form, but is characteristically lyrical, sly, irascible, undeniably funny. His poems continue to startle, the “big topics” mixing with everyday annoyances. (Harcourt)
Marcia’s parents, who still lived in New Jersey, were truly happy when she came to live in the East again. Her father said, “Hey! That’s more like it,” when she first told them she was moving to New York. “About time!” her mother said. Nobody mentioned the years when they had been so bitterly against…
One of those early summer days, driving west on Carson Street, heading for parts unknown, singing aloud in my head, saying Lord, Lord, what am I to do? Not a heaviness in my heart, not a lightness in my heart, but the usual hum and rush of living in this city of bungalows and smokestacks…
Contributor Spotlight With her long story in this issue, Megan Staffel makes a return to our pages — indeed, to any magazine’s pages — after an absence of twenty years, and this fall, her third book, The Notebook of Lost Things, will be published by Soho Press twelve years after her last novel saw print….
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