Nonfiction
Morgan: A Lyric
Come with me if you want to live, the great-chested Schwarzenegger commands in Terminator 2. I’ve never seen it, I confess, clicking to another station. No, too busy rereading The Iliad, Morgan says. At the Met, Leonardo’s drawings: faces where things erupt, the flesh deformed in bubbling lumps; a man on whose chin a growth …
Sublime Physick by Patrick Madden, University of Nebraska Press.
In just one page of one essay in Patrick Madden’s new collection Sublime Physick, the author chisels away at a block quote of Nietzsche, lines from Dante as translated by Longfellow, a verse from the Psalms, and a remark from Solon, the Greek reformer who reprimands Croesus in book one of Herodotus’s Histories. A few …
Miss Saigon
My mother was Miss Saigon of 1973, two years before the fall and capture of the city by the People’s Army of Vietnam and the Viêt Công. There is a solid silver trophy, its height the length of my torso. The cup itself is the circumference of a basketball, and its S-shaped handles are molded …