In the photograph of Billie Holiday taken by Mickey Pallas at the 1957 Newport Jazz Festival, she wears a low-cut evening gown & a fawn-colored stole. Her rhinestone earrings are shoulder-dusters, & her necklace falls almost to her cleavage in heavy leaves of glass stones, or maybe they are real (though paste gems on Billie…
After I flung you down at last onto the bed because it was two a.m. and you’d been crying for hours, it seemed, and would not stop, all my comforting defeated, spent; because you were too frantic by then to say what it was you wanted, sobbing too much to say it, though you kept…
Rita Dove, The Darker Face of the Earth, a play: Dove’s adaptation of Oedipus to a Southern plantation in 1840 premiered at the Oregon Shakespeare Festival this past summer, and this second edition reflects major changes made to the script as it was brought to the stage. (Story Line)
When you shut your eyes to daydream, you’re really imagining the face of God, who, in the fifties, assumed the face of Mrs. Oshkenozi, who sat in her apartment window handing glasses of tap water to boys in pursuit of perfect stickball. Grandpa & his compatriots puffed unfiltered Camels & flirted with imperfect hands of…
The first one was in Michigan and I loved him like I was digging in a foreign land and he was the ruin I came to discover. Michigan is as cold as people imagine and when I remember him now he is leaned against one of those gaudy American cars, big…
George Garrett, The King of Babylon Shall Not Come Against You, a novel: A reporter goes to a Florida town to reinvestigate a series of shocking crimes that occurred twenty-five years ago during the week that Martin Luther King, Jr., was assassinated. (Harcourt Brace)
Right now the men put aside their composing sticks and settle by the hellbox chatting in groups that never seem to vary from day to day. Naturally I’m anxious to fit in naturally, to be considered one amongst metal men and composers. I hesitate on the edge of the…
A noose of moonlight— I think I see what my father saw That night when he went out To the leaning barn— He followed the light, Scared up some rope in the tack room To toss over the beam. The wind rending itself through barbed fences. I found him The next morning, Kneeling…
Marilyn Hacker, Edge, translations of poems by Claire Malroux: Sandra Gilbert comments: “Claire Malroux’s piercing and subtly nuanced poems have been sensitively mediated for English readers in Marilyn Hacker’s poised translations. Malroux has put such American and British writers as Emily Dickinson and Emily Brontë into French with style and grace; her own work has…
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