In northwestern Montana once, I met a person who changed my mind. This well-published and respected writer had moved to that frontier university town, to teach a four-four load, and to be, I suppose, left the hell alone. The English departments of frontier colleges (I once taught in such a place) are often staffed by…
"Well, you have hair on your vagina. That’s a real buzzkill." This was the response my boyfriend, Brian, gave me when some time around our three-month anniversary I got up the courage to address our disappointing sex life. Later that night, when I called an old roommate to confirm that it was normal to have…
Some mornings I try to remember: what is the name of the famous hockey defenseman for the Boston Bruins who, in the last few years of his 22-year career, played for the Colorado Avalanche and who, in his last year of play, was part of a Colorado team that won the Stanley Cup? Ray Bourque….
The senior poet collected things. Porcelain and carved hands, postcards, cobalt glass miniatures, World’s Fair memorabilia, contemporary art. I managed his calendar and his townhouse and his art collection, as well as the more domestic routines of buying groceries and cooking dinner five nights a week—if he wasn’t dining out. He’d made clear in the…
When I was young I used to go to museums with my father in the city where he worked. At the time I didn’t know how to look at art for myself, so often instead of looking at the paintings I just looked at him. I had no idea how art developed and concluded in…
I love poets who bring us to our proper size. Think about taking a picture of a mile-high waterfall, and about that little human figure you need in the shot to suggest the magnitude caught in the image—the tiny person is the scale factor. It isn’t that true scale diminishes the human, but rather that…
"Here’s why I write. Because Poetry begins there where death had not the final word." —Odysseus Elytis I sent out a call to some poets: friends, acquaintances, and some only known to me by their poems. Inevitably I forgot some, and also I am ignorant of many; forgive me. I asked for submissions…
Running throughout this issue, though not by editorial design, is that typically postmodern sense of absence, in so many configurations: in the memoir, for instance, as loss; or in fiction, as the absence of fulfilled desire, the basic plot of a story being that someone wants something and has problems getting it; or in poetry,…
Chi Chi inhaled the screen from her crack pipe.” I laugh and wait for Leslie to join in, but there is only silence on the other end of the line. “You’re serious?” I ask. “You better believe I’m serious. That child gone and almost killed herself.” I want to apologize for laughing, thinking this was…
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