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…
I wanted the Persian Isfahan rug with the all-over garden of paradise design, the one with one thousand two hundred knots per inch. Its sinister history was of no importance to me, irrelevant the conditions of the weavers, whether they were hungry or suffered from carpal tunnel syndrome. I loved the way the tree of…
Fanny Howe, One Crossed Out, poems: The unforgettable voice of many of these poems belongs to May, a homeless woman, the one crossed out. The swirling language conveys a complex consciousness, bridging wisdom and madness, to deliver a searing statement on what it means to be excised from society. (Graywolf)
translated from the Italian by Jonathan Galassi Oh how there in the glittering stretch that bends toward the hills the hum of evening lessens and the trees chat with the hackneyed murmur of the sand; and how this common life no more our own than our breath gets channeled there, crystalline, into orders of…
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…
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