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…
“La poésie vit d’insomnie perpétuelle.” —Rene Char There’s a sickness in me. During the night I wake up & it’s brought a stain into my mouth, as if an ocean has risen & left back a stink on the rocks of my teeth. I stink. My mouth is ugly, human stink. A color like rust…
The bass we catch is too big with years, its dark stripes notched and wavering like a cut trunk’s rings. We drag it over the gunnel, stand back, and no one will touch it, at first. The children cry and want it gone. And when we do let it go, it is not out of…
Charles Simic, Walking the Black Cat, poems: In his thirteenth collection, a National Book Award finalist, Simic melds folklore and black magic with everyday life. (Harvest)
Saturday, Eighth and Broadway, a dozen turtles the color of crushed mint try for the ruby rim of a white enamel bowl on the sidewalk, wet jade jewel cases climbing two or three times the length of their bodies toward heaven till the slick sides of the bowl send them sliding back into their brothers’…
I was told to lie down in the cart, and I did. My braided hair mixed with straw under me to catch the blood I seeped. Then she covered me with heavy furs and brush. The night was stark and cold, the stars close and multiplying like cells as we creaked along under them a…
Tobias Wolff, The Night in Question, short stories: The fourteen tales in this book, Wolff’s first collection in over a decade, amply confirm his place as one of the best storytellers of our time. (Knopf)
I had been awake since balmy Tokyo on a train from lights of pornographic neon to places in silent mountains I will never see again. Across from me in the sleeper an old man undressed the veins in his legs looked like green lightning in hairless, gold skin. He wrapped himself in a robe moved…
No products in the cart.