She stood in the street, perplexed, as if she had just been dropped there. This was the late 1900’s in a Western European city much like any other, when the streets at lunch hour teemed with office slaves, like herself, with their sandwiches slightly wet from sitting in ice all morning, and most of each…
Ann Beattie, Park City: New and Selected Stories: Nearly five hundred pages long, this generous and sparkling collection of thirty-six stories is as much a cultural chronicle as it is a showcase of Beattie’s enormous talents. She goes from the seventies to the present (eight of the stories are brand-new), incisively charting the relational and…
How far, how far would it seem, ahead of the body? Remote takes its time, taciturn. Spool and furl, hope’s quick unravel—remote: a royal worth of dead watches. Replaced hour, single shade, the white-put-there, polite winter, strange chance. Remote turns pale and sends us away to the next abstracted space where Remote’s relatives live in…
(Amphibrachys pedalis) This rare symmetric newt has short limbs that abut a strong unspotted body. Its habitats are worldwide, but naturalists list it as native to Limerick. Hatched from equipoised egg, the newborn amphibrach swims to rhythms of water rippling in rural ponds; wriggles equal forelimbs to dodge the gape of fish-mouths. As tail flutters…
Andre Dubus, Meditations from a Movable Chair, essays: This new collection of twenty-five essays is a radiant follow-up to Broken Vessels. Confined to a wheelchair since a 1986 accident, Dubus reflects on writing, Catholicism, divorce, family, and everyday life in a handicapped-inaccessible world. Resonant, thoughtful, passionate, and superbly written. (Knopf)
Horses mosey across the black lake at the center of the sunflower. I turn away when the pink sun sharpens its claws on the mountain. Light blinks at the tips of leaves that suffer their sights underground. Straw is beaming drumbeats back into stars. The zippers of feathers are rejoining for flight. Alone in a…
Surfacing from the deepest pool I’ve ever fallen into, I emerge gasping for air, and searching for something to tell me where I am and how I got there. Strangers dressed in white who aren’t nice don’t tell me anything I need to know. They just circle the bed, brandishing that tube that brings a…
“The space we breathe is also called distance . . .” —Linda Gregg The trail to the ocean is steep. The grass we walk through, high and wet. I hear clear wind sighing through slender pine, silence between your words: that place your loneliness lives where I want to slip under, move unbroken as…
There is a Zen saying, “Not knowing, we proceed.” At some level this is true for us all. For Jane Hirshfield, such moving forward through enigma can be terrifying, but is also “the richest place to be.” Having recently published a book of essays and a book of poems, she is now beginning a new…
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