What are the sounds that crowd the path And linger above the unmown field? Do you hear? —The winds of heaven are talking In the language of the heart. “June, June,” They say. “June. The lilacs are gone.” Wonderful things are weary of me: The groaning meteors on the August road; The pressed grasses where…
A good man is seized by the police and spirited away. Months later someone brags that he shot him once through the back of the head with a Walther 7.65, and his life ended just there. Those who loved him go on searching the cafés in the Barrio Chino or the bars near the harbor….
Alberto Alvaro Ríos: Pig Cookies and Other Stories, thirteen interrelated tales of a small village in northern Mexico over the course of several decades earlier in this century. (Chronicle)
1. The Eskimo children balance their blackboards on their knees and write with soft fat chalk. A storm skitters across the frozen sea. Smidgeons of ice have swirled into pinwheels. 2. The painter Magritte is dabbing black paint on his canvas. Beneath the clock he writes “wind,” beneath the door “horse.” 3. The Eskimo children…
Having begun the day with a headache, Bonnie Saks was not particularly surprised to find herself finishing it the same way. Pain, in her experience, never disappeared; it merely retreated for a while and then came back when least convenient in another form. Like men, she thought. All afternoon there had been a chilly, puttering…
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…
Ellen Bryant Voigt: Kyrie, a mosaic of sonnets that conjures up the influenza pandemic of 1918-19, which killed half a million people in the U.S. Voigt first focuses on a family and then branches out to separate voices. (Norton)
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