It’s been a great joy for me to work as an editor again, to have the privilege of sampling the range and richness of contemporary writing at its sources, and of compiling some of that writing in what’s essentially a book, created as much by its internal juxtapositions as by individual pieces’ indelible strengths. Prose…
The speaker is the young black man Susan Smith claimed kidnapped her children. Susan Smith has invented me because Nobody else in town will do what She needs me to do. I mean: jump in an idling car And drive off with two sad and Frightened kids in the back. Like a bad…
Work boots in the basement thrown against a wall. The garden dies in the mind— nasturtiums entwined on a chain-link fence. The gods he carried nothing but dried crusts. That vintage bottle on the table crushed more each time he hammers it.
The city is still the same handful of glances, Glimpses of alleyways like wounds laid open, Balconies of laundry drying, names of streets Unfolding in the smells of fishscale, kelp, And poverty . . . Across Fleet Landing, sheets Of blind-white glare seethe off the spires and stairflights Through me, through my sea-pitched, sea-numb…
When my grandfather turned ninety we had a party in a restaurant in Harlem called Copeland’s. Harlem restaurants are always dim to dark and this was no exception. Daddy would have gone downtown but Baba, as we called him, wanted to stay in the neighborhood, and this place was “swanky.” We picked him up in…
The speaker is the young black man Susan Smith claimed kidnapped her children. Who are you, mister? One of the boys asks From the eternal back seat, And here is the one good thing: If I am alive, then so, briefly are they, Two boys returned, three and one, Quiet and scared, bunched…
Chase Twichell: The Ghost of Eden, Twichell’s fourth book of poems, a visionary sequence of interlocking meditations on the death of nature as we know it. The “ghost” is both the shadow of the paradise we have so carelessly ruined, and the poet herself. (Ontario Review Press)
My favorite God a horse the color of my name. And when I ride him, a heat between my legs, like tongue on ice, friction of moon against darkness. Over and over, the hooves, the rain, finding the ground. Hearts, black boots flung there in the mud behind us. And all around us, the leaves…
Ned loved Betsy, a blond waitress who lived in the suburbs. Only Betsy was in love with Peter, the race-car mechanic, who had muscles and a black Corvette, and wore a cross inside his T-shirt. But Peter was half-crazy over Anne, his beautiful X- lover, who said, “You’re nothing but a loser,” and left…
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