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…
i am a man’s head hunched in the road. i was chosen to speak by the members of my body. the arm as it pulled away pointed toward me, the hand opened once and was gone. why and why and why should I call a white man brother? who is the human in this place,…
Say that moment crossing over isn’t heard Say the hammer-anvil-stirrup don’t unfurl Say the balance was upset Say this balance was upset Say the outside world doesn’t ring Say the mind’s ear listening to an odd man singing Say the moment crossing over starting somewhere out and in Say the balance was upset Say this…
Fatherhood is like dying. A flood of days pools at the neck. Glub. He was born on the th of June. In the movie version, ghostly Jennifer Jason Leigh sits at the bus station, strung out, penniless, blowing cigarette smoke at the bruises on her distant, fetal legs, and dreaming of an Academy Award. Careful…
In the closet the dress lives, a deep white in its vinyl bag, eternal, the empire waist so stylish before her time and after, its crêpe ivoried, tartared like a tooth, feeding on what leaks through the zipper’s fervent mesh, an unmentionable, unworn, waiting, immortally in mind. Open a window, please, I’m feeling faint. On…
for César Vallejo To speak with a simple mouth. No more big words. Bread works. Butter, a long walk by the river works, salt, fog, wood. I know how to turn myself cold, to cut everything off— I can slice my heart to minnows, but it’s my wish to remain alive, God with and without…
for Gregory J. Pamel, M.D. Dawn is ugly, a fug over day, a tarpaulin on a top-of-the-line motorcycle. An amaryllis has a hideous nativity: two shoots peer from the bulb frantically as a chick peers out of its ovular jail. Beginnings are rarely pretty: think of sperm, woolly mammoths, pre-atmospheric goo. Beginning, too, is the…
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