after Natalia Ginzburg “The following essay, ‘He and I,’ captures the seesaw of human companionship and love with a patience and sensitivity to interconnectedness that it is hard to imagine a male essayist attempting, much less equaling.” -Phillip Lopate She is quintessentially French. I am, in the loosest sense of the word, American. She always…
Someone dumped it here one night, locked the wheel and watched it tumble into goldenrod and tansy, ragweed grown over one door flung outward in disgust. They did a good job, too: fenders split, windshield veined with an intricate pattern of cracks and fretwork. They felt, perhaps, a rare satisfaction as the chassis crunched…
A drunk man reels his tractor around the square lawn, midnight. His wife stares from the front door window as if on a half-sunk ship’s deck at a shark tearing through the dark water. She chews her thumbnail raw. Two of their sons, in blue pajamas, shuffle across the linoleum rubbing their eyes. She plays…
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…
Lorrie Moore hasn’t had a full night’s sleep in three and a half years. It’s not what you think, however. She has not, like one of her characters, fallen prey to love woes or obsessive-compulsive panic. If anything, Lorrie Moore is far tougher than most people would suspect. It’s simply that she has a feisty…
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…
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…
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…
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