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Kathryn Davis’s new memoir explores memory as something formative—something that begins as a static point then transitions into something alive, yielding something new, remembering becoming an experience in its own right.
If one were to substitute “opioid” for “morphine,” Mikhail Bulgakov’s 1926 novella feels like it could have been written yesterday. Reading it is thus nearly unbearable: it asks us to look at how little perception and treatment of substance use disorder has changed over the course of a hundred years.
Ravi Shankar’s new memoir positions traumatic memory and its Hartmanian alignment with a paradoxical capacity for both knowledge and nescience at center-stage: the reader is warned that the tale to be told may in one sense be fictive as much as factual, but that it will, nonetheless, be told truly.
Doireann Ní Ghríofa’s 2020 novel is a conversation between women, one of whom has the freedom to speak her long and impassioned set-piece in her famous keen but perilous little more, and another who is—by facing squarely that seductive, obliterating control that could empty room after room—creating herself.
The poems that imagine photographs, the making and distribution of images to one or many friends, to strangers, revisit a figurative injection posed in Jana Prikryl’s first collection: a poem is not functional, a poem is something to be experienced in time.
Jane Hirshfield recommends Complete Poems by Jim Harrison (Copper Canyon, 2021). “Jim Harrison’s poems have a vitality, range, and revelation equal in importance to the more widely known fiction. A pitch-perfect field guide, Harrison scouts with full sense of kinship and acrobatic powers of both language and imagination his life’s landscapes, events, and fellow creatures….
In fiction, our winner is Meghan O’Toole, for her short story “Good Food for Starving Things.” Of the story, fiction judge Kiley Reid says, “‘Good Food for Starving Things’—dark, abrupt, and a bit wild—is a deft cross-pollination concerning what it means to be a beast, and what it means to belong. With addictive and highly…
Cora holds the baby until Matt leans in and takes her back. She can smell the oily lank of his hair, the sweet of his breath. She’d suggested a hotel room—there must be something nearby, she said, but her daughter insisted she stay in the apartment with them. Families belong together, she said. Cora’s daughter…
Christiane Jacox’s first book of poetry, Bears Dancing in the Northern Air (Yale University Press, 1991), received the Yale Younger Poets Prize in 1990. Her translation of Gabriela Mistral’s Poemas de las Madres was published by Eastern Washington University Press in 1996. In the years since, her translations and poems have made their slow way into journals including Poetry magazine, Sundog…
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