(Iowa City, IA: University of Iowa Press, 2015) Harnessing the power of observation in service of revelation is slow, painstaking work, but its results appear effortless in the best nonfiction. Maggie Messitt achieves this in her elegant first book, The … Continued
You have occupied my husband’s imagination when he otherwise might have been bored. You gave him pretty shapes to behold at the mall, in the supermarket, when he peered from behind his Newsweek at the airport. Oh thong wearer, the … Continued
It’s the day after Christmas, 2004. I’m eight years old. It’s about 8:30 am, and the sea is acting funny. It drags itself back kilometer after kilometer. We watch it go, slowly. When it stops, it piles up on itself, … Continued
(Toronto, Ontario: McClelland & Stewart, 2015) Fibonacci numbers were, I think, my first formal introduction to the idea that math and science are essential to the beauty of the natural world. I was in early elementary school when I learned … Continued
From work I usually go straight home to feed the cubs, who’ve come to depend on me for dinner, which isn’t necessarily healthy but has its gratifying aspects-for all of us, I think. But this had been one of those … Continued
My children stopped eating when we moved to this country. Their sandwiches come home untouched in their sacks, whole apples, whole crackers, un-nibbled pieces of cheese. Breakfast, they refuse fruit, toast, yogurt. They sip dew-beads of water from narrow edges … Continued
The stories and poems collected here are largely about perspective, specifically the shifting perspectives of age. Our governing principle as we chose work for this issue was youth versus age—or experience. The result is that everything you’ll read here is … Continued
“Every Jew has two requests of God: a place in paradise in the next world, and a place on the Tel Aviv beach in this world,” wrote Sholem Asch, the Polish-born novelist, in 1937. Stretching five kilometers from its … Continued
(Denton, TX: University of North Texas Press, 2014) Think of one year of your life when you were perfectly happy. Not a special day, or that week you spent in Cabo, but a full year. Can you do it? In … Continued
Translated from Norwegian by Robert Hedin and Dag T. Straumsvåg He got this disease, a small disease, but it was all he had. His parents were dead, his friends gone. At first he was reserved. Then he noticed the disease had … Continued
The world was going to end at 11:36 that night. It would be very anticlimactic; the universe, due to some comical flaw in its construction, was simply going to collapse on itself at the speed of light. An international team … Continued
(Brooklyn, NY: Brooklyn Arts Press, 2014) Many of the poems in Erika Jo Brown’s debut collection, I’m Your Huckleberry, are “traditional” love poems written to the speaker’s beloved. But Brown’s poems are also love poems to language (not the language … Continued
In the airport babies were crying. Babies all through the building were howling themselves into stupors. One baby must have started it and the others were moved to join in. I pulled my suitcase past the gates, where people sat … Continued
ze-nith n. 1. For twenty years Alyson attempted every diet fad imaginable with no success. Grapefruit, South Beach, Suzanne Somers, Hilton Head; the list of Alyson’s failed diets read like the glossary to a B-movie star’s unauthorized biography. If only … Continued
(Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2015) “All day I was digging Armenian bones out of the Syrian desert…” So remembers poet and essayist Peter Balakian in the titular poem of his new collection, Ozone Journal. One hundred years on, … Continued
1 The woman who had lost her way placed the jar on the table. The lid was sealed with green wax. A lightning bolt was painted on the jar. She cut the seal and pried open the lid. Wind rushed … Continued
Florida’s just a thumb on a jigsaw puzzle, but under water the Weeki Watchee Mermaids pour their tea, cook, exercise, iron clothes, guzzle with muscular skill their Grapette soda, with only occasional surreptitious sucks on an air hose hidden in … Continued
Translated from the Hebrew by Peter Cole (New York, NY: New Directions, 2015) “Otherwise, it would have returned to the darkness…” At almost exactly the midpoint of Yoel Hoffman’s Moods, the first-person narrator (who throughout the book refers to himself … Continued
The first time Judy and I saw the naked man, it was by accident. We were thirteen and we were crossing the Walnut Street bridge over the railroad tracks, talking about whether we would ever get an abortion or would … Continued
The gas is a furnace of life a sizzling assembly line of wings and hair-like legs I must have been put together like that in a sudden burning string of letters ### Karina Borowicz has work in Bellevue Literary Review, American … Continued
(Ann Arbor, MI: Dzanc Books, 2015) Coming into my adult life in the post-9/11, bubble-and-burst epoch of my country’s history, I have formed some jumbled impressions of what precisely other people mean when they refer to ‘The American Dream.’ It … Continued
I have many ideas for you it’s time to meet in this room I have its color is very odd torn like animals, half-apart and reversed grey/pink, grey to pink how I hate it all a morphed coral … Continued
Translated from Spanish by Jeannine Marie Pitas In the dark air of the night, of the room, a new saint is walking. I watch him; I know him, even without seeing, without looking at him. Like the figs he tastes of grass and … Continued
(New York, NY: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2015) It’s strange how you can see the same things day after day and not give them a second thought. I ride a train into work every day. I keep my head down and … Continued
He takes me to a bar where we play chicken shit bingo, stand around waiting for a chicken to take a shit on a board covering a pool table. There are numbers on this board and the number I was … Continued
Because I’m washed up, a fraction of myself. So miniscule I’m sure someone threw me a garden party & snipped off the heads of my guests—those droopy perennial know-it-alls. The world’s so tired, it melts down at the core. God, … Continued
Works Discussed: The Shunra and the Schmetterling by Yoel Hoffman, translated from the Hebrew by Peter Cole; The Heart is Katmandu by Yoel Hoffman, translated from the Hebrew by Peter Cole; The Christ of Fish by Yoel Hoffman, translated from the Hebrew by … Continued
“I suppose it starts to happen first in the suburbs…people starting to come apart.” —Shirley Jackson, ‘Pillar of Salt’ Kirk house is still empty I see, poor front border guzzled by furze and lions. did you know them? sure, … Continued
The white rose. The celestial silence. The lake of light. The bed-like inner thigh Of empyrean buttermilk and gold, Call it what you will, it wakes me tonight. Heaven reheavens. And the mind’s prelude To the touch of your lips … Continued
Translated from the French by Alison Anderson (New York, NY: Europa Editions, 2010) I finished The Sexual Life of an Islamist in Paris, by Leїla Marouane, on a night when it was raining in Tallahassee, and the café where I had … Continued