Before work I would stop by Constantine’s place for a glass of red wine and a cup of coffee. He kept the wine under the counter and poured it in secret into a large tumbler. “If anyone asks,” he once said, “tell them it’s the milk of a red cow.” You could tell which men…
More than a few people have assumed that Howard Norman is a Canadian writer. It’s no wonder, considering that most of his work — including his first two novels, The Northern Lights and The Bird Artist, both of which were nominated for the National Book Award — is set in Canada. In fact, Norman was…
What she is waiting for never arrives or arrives so slowly she can’t see it: like the river bluing silver and wearing minutely deeper into its channel, the flow hardens to carved stone as she fidgets beneath the whirling fan impatient for the train that rocks us above the water to…
The wine is perfect, an arterial red, a red so serious in candlelight it’s black. He lifts the chipped glass and toasts his brother with a slight nod, a little backward gesture of the head only the two of them understand. The late night crowds around the closed windows giving back the two old men,…
It was a scraggy landscape, a Vermont mentally and physically full of uneven footholds, dirt paths, and dark trees — but green with possibility. In 1965, Jane Shore and a few other classmates came to the door of Cate Farm, the place we rented from Goddard College, where my husband taught, and they all stepped…
1 The Roxie is down the street from the locked ward where I left my husband. I took the children to the movies that night, a comedy about the war: in the candy dark, the laughs went off like explosions. Here’s the letter he left me, a green crayon scrawl. These are the sayings I…
I go back to the scene where the two men embrace & grapple a handgun at stomach level between them. They jerk around the apartment like that holding on to each other, their cheeks almost touching. One is shirtless, the other wears a suit, the one in the suit came in through a window to…
Frank Bidart, Desire, poems: Bidart’s long-awaited new collection-his first book since In the Western Night: Collected Poems 1965-90-contains some of his most luminous and intimate work to date. The first half include poems about the art of writing, Eros, and the desolations and mirror of history (in a narrative based on Tacitus). The second half…
When he sang of what had passed, the trees would lean toward him, he could suspend the suffering of the damned, he could bring back the dead. Don’t look back! . . . Hell is a spotless room overlooking the ocean; she wants out. “I’m heading for nowhere, what do I have to look…
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