Translated from the Spanish by Lisa Dillman (High Wycombe, Buckinghamshire: And Other Stories, 2015) How do we survive in a world so hollowed out that it occasionally devours its own? Makina, the protagonist of Yuri Herrera’s borderlands novel, Signs Preceding the End … Continued
I can see the rift in the lake as David’s father yells again for his mother to gun the engine She guns it but he’s still too old to get up on the water He won’t stop saying to David … Continued
Beneath his eyes the skin is blue because he is tired of scissors and the paper he carries home, tired of the sound of the classroom animals he hears, waiting for sleep, tired of the morning bowl of cereal and … Continued
(Brooklyn, NY: Melville House, 2014) “I know that my name will resound in the ears of my loved ones as perfectly as a picture. And I also know that sometimes it will cease to Be a name And will be … Continued
That’s how it was then, a knife through cartilage, a body broken. Animal and animal as mineral ash. A window smashed. The collective howl as a general alarm followed by quiet. Boot-black night, halogen hum. Tape snaking through a stealth … Continued
[SPOILER ALERT] Everything is people. It should have been obvious with the way so many disappear and never return. So many lost—grandma, your high school gym teacher, that girl from the news. Why did it take so long to uncover … Continued
(Brooklyn, NY: Melville House, 2014) To be lost, forgotten, rejected. In a word: failure. There are precious few words in the English language that strike so hard, or cut so deep, bereft of nicety or preamble. No matter how one … Continued
Arnie makes his careful way up the walk at a moonless two am on memory and a sliver of lamplight through closed curtains. Laura left the lights on again, every one except the porch light. Arnie goes through the house … Continued
(New York, NY: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2010) In his introduction to the advance reader copy of Sam Lipsyte’s new novel The Ask, Lipsyte’s editor offers the opinion that the comic novel is currently out of favor. I would argue … Continued
And as I sat there, far away, I found myself cataloging the few things I own, and I began to think about a day when I’d ended up at a small flea market out on Coney Island. The market was … Continued
the birds that night were saying no more than they had to, they were saying no more, they were saying no more than they had, so the conductor of the night stopped it, saying, “first bird, mark the slurs and … Continued
Would it help to know I’m a little in love with your husband? Or that I’m in love with my own, and I’m not going anywhere? Or that the version of me you hear in this poem is a version … Continued
Translated from the Romanian by Michael Henry Heim (New York, NY: New Directions, 2015) The narrator of Max Blecher’s semi-autobiographical novel, Adventures in Immediate Irreality, is a tree. Understandably, he is desperate for his love interest, Edda, to understand. It … Continued
Translated from Russian by Andrew Wachtel Last night an icy rain fell, and in the morning it got cold. I wake up at six fifteen thinking about the cleaning lady, who is supposed to come at eight. Wednesday is my … Continued
Translated from the Spanish by Yvette Siegert (Brooklyn, NY: Ugly Duckling Presse, 2015) Last November, my introduction to Diana’s Tree was similar to that awe one feels when meeting an exceptional human being—I was rendered speechless. After my first read through … Continued
Mermaid You show reluctance behind the fire hydrant spray. Haze hangs higher than sun over water. You were there, impeccable. Hygiene washes up on shore. To make a myth out of what happened. A table tipped over separates the … Continued
Eileen Myles is not a woman poet. She is not a rockstar. She is not a badass. She is not a Catholic. She is not a politician. Eileen Myles is not a New Yorker. She is not a nature poet. … Continued
(New York, NY: Black Balloon Publishing, 2014) Butterflies. That’s what they call that feeling of dread you experience deep down in the pit of your stomach before doing something that scares you, or after you’ve done something wrong. Tiny little explosions … Continued
(G) Ian Svenonius was the lead singer of the 1990s radical punk band Nation of Ulysses. He wrote the books Psychic Soviet and Supernatural Strategies for Starting a Band. At his reading last night he proclaimed that four is a … Continued
1. A brand in a can and, later, conveniently in sticks, but also a word—crisco— applying to any shortening, any oil teased from its natural state to stay solid at room temp. Used with a peppering of coffee grounds to … Continued
The discovery of the Malay flying dragon depends in part on our desire for its existence, as its first image in Farquhar’s book depends on the Chinese artist anonymously commissioned to paint it in Farquhar’s name. Both acts being opportunities … Continued
(Portland, OR: Tin House Books, 2014) Over the last several months, it seems, the internet has been exploding with issues about women’s health and well-being, issues of inequality, issues of gendered violence. There was a month in the summer when … Continued
(Minneapolis, MN: Milkweed Editions, 2014) The poems in Sara Eliza Johnson’s Bone Map are unmistakably kindred with one another; though neither formally unified nor linear in any discernible way, each one seems to resonate with the next. Driven by a … Continued
Fran Alexander famously brought cans of condensed milk to the teahouse so that she would never have to leave. Her standards, that is, were impossibly high. There is broadness in the explanations of this biography that makes them … Continued
Translated from Spanish by Yvette Siegert For Raúl Gustavo Aguirre This mania of knowing myself an angel, without age, without a death in which to live me, without piety for my name or for my bones that sob as they … Continued
More than a few people have told me I talk like Scarlett Johansson. I have a low voice, I guess, which sounds funneled through fleshy lips. I was with a man once who was obsessed with the resemblance. I mean … Continued
The baby was crying, really crying, but GraceAnn didn’t know what to do. She dumped the little boy, kicking and screaming, into his crib and closed the door to the nursery. Her arms and neck were stiff with rage. That … Continued
(Fredonia, NY: Leapfrog Press, 2014) The characters in David Armstrong’s story collection “Going Anywhere” live in the darkness on the edge of town. Fractured by loss—aimless infidelities, deflated ambition, damaged or absent children—they limp through landscapes rural but not pastoral, … Continued
Vic was fully absorbed, examining a display of Guatemalan worry dolls on a rectangular folding table when I walked up behind him. The dolls were made from colorful thread wrapped around wire armatures. Each one had a price tag pressed … Continued
white field. And the dog dashing past me into the blank, toward the nothing. Or: not running anymore but this idea of him, still in his gold fur, being what I loved him for first, so that now on the … Continued