Nonfiction

In language both sensitive and terse, "Close to Autumn" explores the feelings of a motherless child. Edie is seven and long accustomed to living alone with her agreeable, devoted young father. She shyly admires his new girlfriend, too, and comes to cherish moments when the three of them can be together. But she is unaccountably…

I first met Wayne Johnson's "Red Deer" during my fiction writing class at Iowa in the fall of 1986. Among the students in that class were two young men who wrote exclusively about themes that have come to be associated with the American West. The majority of students in the class were Easterners, and they…

Yolanda Barnes comes from California. She majored in journalism and graduated Phi Beta Kappa from the University of Southern California. While she was a student she wrote for the Black student newspaper, Alluswe, and freelanced for the Los Angeles Times. After graduating, she worked at the Hartford Courant. (An outstanding athlete, she also taught, for…

Craig Raine's new kind of poetry has yet to reach a substantial audience in the United States. But, if the reviews can be believed, Raine's reputation in Britain exceeds that of any contemporary poet on this side of the Atlantic. Raine's four books- The Onion, Memory, A Martian Sends a Post Card Home, Rich, and…

I discovered Craig Raine's work (first his remarkable second book A Martian Sends a Postcard Home and then his first book The Onion, Memory) about eight years ago. I was immediately struck by its eloquence, which is never stuffy or merely decorative, by the sharpness of its tone, and by the odd rightness of its…

Asked what he worked at, Oscar Wilde's brother Willie would reply, "At intervals." This kind of innocuous controlled explosion which sends a phrase sky-high the moment before it reassembles, younger and wiser and apparently unfazed, is analogous to the effect achieved by certain poems. It defamiliarizes, yes, but mostly in order to refamiliarize. It glamorizes…

There was a time when New York was everything to me: my mother, my mistress, my Mecca . . . . I distinctly remember wondering, stroll- ing the bright and un-blasted streets, why it was that all the other American cities weren't depopulated now that their young people were free once again to get up…

Déconstruction est passée, as they say on the Champs-Elysées. One mirror facing another inside a mirrored sphere spins scintillations too tiny and brief to illuminate the unetherized body slabbed for autopsy. Deconstruction is reflective, but of what? Of collective despair, some scholars think. Though we each push our own hopes before us like wheel-barrows through…

The original intention of editing an issue of Ploughshares was a collection of dramatic verse, either written directly for theatrical performance or adaptable for the stage. There were few submissions. Instead, resolutely lyrical poems came, altering intention. There are many names I would have liked to see here, but the pleasures of discovery of new…