Nonfiction

  • Coming of Age in Book Country

    I knew I was back in New York when I saw children walking to school with books open in their hands. I’d lived away for fifteen years. Now down the streets of Brooklyn they drifted, novels spread wide between their palms, the actual world comprising a mere running margin of asphalt and high-heeled shoes and…

  • Objects of Affection

    Each summer when I’m in Krakow, I make weekly trips to a flea market close to our apartment. This particular market also sells antiques, but it doesn’t aspire to a loftier name, because it also peddles secondhand books, last year’s issues of fashion magazines, handmade jewelry, items that aren’t old in the sense that antiques…

  • Catcher’s Hang

    Diane stands on the bar of the trapeze, pacing and gesturing nonchalantly as a professor lecturing on the ground might. We stand in a circle at her feet, self-conscious in our leotards. We look up hopefully, with awe…we are hoping that she can teach us to fly too. I suspect that as little girls we…

  • Dojo

    From Years Ago, a memoir Tory Fukada showed me how to crank the corners and I practiced, abandoning the graceful strokes of cursive she’d also taught for the bold design, which seemed meant to be carved but smoldered like a brand. Dozens whirled like pinwheels on the barbed-wire page. I loved the prickly maze, the…

  • Turning Points

    A map unfolds into a world where new poems, new ways of writing them, a new way of living, become possible. My turning points have included the discovery of the city of Istanbul, where I spend a few weeks every year, and my eventual immigration to Ireland, where I now live. With an accent instantly…

  • Evidence of Things Unseen

    Now faith is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen. —Hebrews 11:1 1. Morphine makes me small, airborne. Like a spider. I rest in a high corner of the ceiling, look down on my body on the white hospital bed. It was just one shot, one needle through my skin….

  • Remembering Ray Bourque

    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….

  • Fig Leaf

    "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…

  • Tempo and Duration

    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…