When I turned twelve and feared I’d go to hell, I used to write lists of my mortal sins on paper scraps I tucked into my wallet. Each time I broke one of the big commandments— not little ones, such as to honor parents which even Jesus, like me the son of peasants, had never…
Marie Howe, What the Living Do, poems: Howe’s powerful, much-anticipated second collection gives us stories of childhood, its thicket of sex and sorrow and joy, of boys and girls growing into men and women, and of a beloved brother who in his dying offered lessons on how to be most alive. (Norton)
All dressed up in the back of a taxi stopped at a traffic light on Central Park West one cocktail hour in December, I happened to spot a pair of shoes dangling in the air— brown, clownish workshoes dancing like marionettes from the thick strings of their knotted laces, which somebody (with a ladder?) had…
for Kyo-jin When Mrs. Im went back to Seoul to die it rained and I thought of her dying. It was March and cold there though it made no difference to her her hair no longer blue-black shoulder-length spirals of a young Mrs. Im the wife of Pastor Im’s brother but frizzy wire ends flattened…
Dan Wakefield, Going All the Way, a novel: First published in 1970, this coming-of-age novel of the 1950’s, described as “The Midwestern Catcher in the Rye,” has been reprinted in a new edition with a foreword by Kurt Vonnegut. A film based on Wakefield’s own adaptation was released this past fall. (Indiana)
The funicular, effortless as a toy, glides humming to a stop halfway uphill. Teeming with tourists, the steps break halfway again at a terrace where we pause to catch our breath, and half of Paris— though today, in the August haze, the view from Montmartre is just the odd tin…
It was July and the peaches were green a man born in the year of the chicken with no knack for wealth or common knowledge lowered the box full of green peaches for a girl to see a girl at the front gate turning eight and waiting for a thing of wheels this is where…
John C. Zacharis Award Ploughshares and Emerson College are pleased to present Carolyn Ferrell with the seventh annual John C. Zacharis Award for her collection of stories, Don’t Erase Me, which was published this summer by Houghton Mifflin. The $1,500 award — which is funded by Emerson College and named after the college’s former president —…
A piece of paper Which appeared to be blank But on which we see Writing had faded. “My first is of the Possessive of those Given to possession. And my last, the finality Of that proposition. In entirety I give That which in three worlds doth live. Ungainly in the two; In all, long-legged beauty,…
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