Nonfiction
Lilacs
There was a photo from my childhood that I hated of me and the lilacs. I was standing in the backyard of our house in New Jersey, and my motherhad asked me to pull a lilac blossom closer to my face. I didn’t want to pose with the lilacs in my face. It felt artificial and …
Nowhere Place
Loosely tethered to my body, my psyche resists its physical boundaries. Reaches out, trying to escape from this breathing object, me, but it can only go so far. My fingers curl and uncurl, clench and unclench. Spasms of habit trigger points of pain in my wrist and the joints of my hands. Tighten my fists until …
Madness Is Remembering
First, he reminded you of Eros in the cave. In Paris, you saw Canova’s sculpture Psyche Revived by Cupid’s Kiss shortly before you met him, and when you invited him into your bed, you saw his naked form and remembered the statue, and named him Love: delicate, yet masculine, waif-like but sure as the white …
If Bees Are Few: A Hive of Bee Poems edited by James Lenfestey, University of Minnesota Press
If Bees Are Few is an anthology spanning 2,500 years "from Sappho to Sherman Alexie," as its cover copy suggests. Edited by James Lenfestey, it is as eclectic in its selection as it is vast in its time frame. The book takes its title from Emily Dickinson, who was herself fascinated with bees, and comes …
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 …
Tyehimba Jess. Olio. Wave Books.
Tyehimba Jess’s 2016 Olio is mammoth. Comprised of letters, interviews, sketches, architectural and mathematical poems, "Jubilees," songs, conversations, and formal poems, and accompanied by a playlist of musicians, Jess’s second offering introduces us to (reminds us of) thirteen "first-generation-freed voices" plus the Fisk Jubilee Singers, all of whom "coalesce in counterpoint, name nemeses, summon tongue …
My Bricks Be Foul
It smelled like that potbellied rat, sprawled on its bloodied side for at least a month and ground partway into the alley floor by a steady succession of Rivieras and 225s. It stank like the sweaty, fuzzed pocket between all of everyone’s toes. It smelled like the gusts of musty air between Elder William’s old …