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…
It’s an old garden story; it started with the fall. I was making my way across some stones that my husband had set, into a section of my garden that was obscured by weeds—big, shoulder-high ones, upstart saplings, overeager goldenrod, a mass of sprawlers and climbers like wild grape vine and poison ivy. I was…
In nonfiction, our winner is J Lazar, for her piece “The End of What We Know.’” Of the essay, nonfiction judge Meghan O’Rourke says, “In formally exploratory and lyrical prose, the author explores the stakes—and losses—entailed in migration. If migration is the ‘end of what we know,’ the essay asks, then how can nonfiction adequately…
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