The two-lane highway clings to the lakeshore, passes through a rocky tunnel, and climbs Spooner Pass. I listen to music, telling myself my recent symptoms mean nothing, even as I feel a whoosh of vertigo. It’s late September, and the aspens are just starting to change—light green against the Sierra blue sky. It’s a beautiful…
My sophomore year of college, I had a job in the cafeteria dish room: scraping food off plates, stacking trays, helping the occasional panicked freshman dig through trash for a lost retainer. At the end of fall semester, I got an unexpected call from the financial aid office. The college’s professional literary magazine was looking…
1. No one knows whether butterflies act fromconsciousness or instinct. The in-flight map showed twenty-eight hundred miles traveled when our plane touched down in Fort Lauderdale. Jordan was looking out the window in her Buffalo Bills cap, seeing Florida for the first time. Between us, in the middle seat, Elle scrunched her curly blond hair…
Early in April of 1784, behind the grime-streaked walls of King’s Bench Prison in south London, a twenty-nine-year-old Charlotte Smith received news of her first publication. The poet wasn’t locked away on her own account. When Charlotte was fifteen, her father had arranged for her marriage to Benjamin Smith, the twenty-three-year-old son of a successful…
Laura van den Berg, State of Paradise (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2023) Jay Neugeboren, After Camus (Madville Publishing, 2024) Lloyd Schwartz, Folhas (Leaves), edited and translated from Portuguese by Maria Lúcia Milléo Martins and Regina Przybycien (7Letras Press Rio de Janeiro, 2023)
David Gullette recommends Joseph “Jay” Featherstone’s third collection of poems, Rising Out of Nowhere (Fenway Press, 2023). “This collection shows an experienced poet at the top of his game. Particularly sharp is the sense of place—in his case, Gloucester’s Eastern Point—where he watches as ‘A great Atlantic roller swings / toward land, flowing, green. /…
We are witnessing a war—multiple wars—whose scale and devastation are overwhelming. Every day, pictures of maimed or murdered children, carried in the arms of their grieving families, flicker on our social media timelines. Nearly every post asks the same questions: Does our suffering not matter? Who will bear witness to our loss? To lose a…
She stands with other statues and shattered friezes like the debris of some blast or the wreckage of a sunken ship. Her pious gaze and the elegant fold of her robe add a touch of pride to the centuries contouring her face and truncated body. The incarnated goddess of death still stands, dignified and somewhat…
I’ll never forget the day I saw my first massacre. Or, rather, its fresh aftermath. It might’ve been in the context of the Ambazonian Crisis. It might’ve been Boko Haram–related. But at the beginning of the video, there’s a mountain of clothed corpses, bare feet and arms smeared in red clay, protruding from the tangle…
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