Article

  • The Right Kind

    There was this cock in high school, not that I had anything to do with it but we girls talked a lot, giggled, how it had a job to do and was often seen rising behind its spandex suit at the country club. It worked pretty good, we figured, but there was this one girl…

  • About Gary Soto: A Profile

    In one of his essays, Gary Soto writes that as a child, he had imagined he would “marry Mexican poor, work Mexican hours, and in the end die a Mexican death, broke and in despair.” The statement might seem surprising, coming as it does from such a well-established writer. Considered one of the best Chicano…

  • Buffalo Safety

    A man walks into the gallery on a sunny afternoon carrying a fistful of golf clubs. I’m aware that there’s been some kind of traffic thing going on outside for the last few minutes, but I haven’t gone to the window to check it out-happens all the time around here. The softening silence of the…

  • After the Cold War

    Sacred day of rain, the crowds on Karol’s Bridge thin out, slightly repentant of their tourist ways, hunker down in pensions and hotels, to ponder the weird twists of language to be found in their brochures, or complain of the thinness of the towels, or of the pickpockets who speak the quick language of the…

  • The Apprentice

    Deborah set about making herself useful from the minute she woke up, and most mornings she was first in the household to rise. She pushed off the bedcovers, slipped into her robe, and washed in the bathroom, dressing cautiously and wincing if a zipper or button clanked against the closet door; her bed was in…

  • The Common by Gail Mazur

    Gail Mazur: The Common (Univ. of Chicago), her third collection of poems, of which Lloyd Schwartz comments: ” ‘Dislocated’ in Houston, New Englander Gail Mazur writes that she’s determined to look at her new surroundings ‘with the wise tough eye of exile.’ She succeeds-partly because, like so many of our very best poets, she is…

  • Shades

    I was fourteen that summer. August brought heat I had never known, and during the dreamlike drought of those days, I saw my father for the first time in my life. The tulip poplars had faded to yellow before September came. There was no rain for weeks, and the people’s faces along Eleventh Street wore…