Nonfiction
Sunday: A Travelogue
The real secret of magic is that the world is made of words, and that if you know the words that the world is made of you can make of it whatever you wish. – Terence McKenna Sunday morning. Late to wake, again. Again in a panic. Again, I startle to find a full-grown man …
Drawing a Breath
I It starts and ends with a breath. The shock of air on a newborn’s cheek, the cold kiss of it. This is what beckons a first breath. It isn’t born of need, not a hunger for air nor scarcity that compels us to fill our lungs for the first time. Rather, drawing a breath …
Damming the Nile: A Poet’s Ecology
The Nile has always been the beginning and the end of all things.Baher Kamal What happens to a person when displaced from their place of origin? At the core of diasporic understanding is the separation of people from their land. Culture and its material symbols can sometimes be emulated, carried, and reinvented from place to …
13 Superstitions
Always return a kiss under the mistletoe. Kiss the boy who is with you now but always looking for someone better. Kiss him even when you know he has been kissing someone else, late nights in her father’s race car stacked on bricks in the yard. Kiss him later, for nostalgia’s sake, after he has …
Review of Paul Beatty’s The Sellout
Few novelists write characters as improbably multitudinous as Paul Beatty. In The White Boy Shuffe, Gunnar Kaufman is a poet, basketball player, and messiah. In Tuff, Tuffy Foshay is a drug-slinger, competitive eater, sumo-wrestling enthusiast, and candidate for city council. In Slumberland, Ferguson ‘‘DJ Darky’’ Sowell is a sax player, jukebox sommelier, porn film composer, …
Working Girl
I want to be a model or a writer. I am neither of these things. What I am is fifteen and five foot eight, with collarbones deep enough to drink my black coffee out of, a head full of dreams, and a job with Western Australia’s largest and only Sunday newspaper. The job is my …
Federer as Irreligious Experience
In 2006 David Foster Wallace opened his much celebrated New York Times Magazine essay “Federer as Religious Experience” with “Almost anyone who loves tennis and follows the men’s tour on television has, over the last few years, had what might be termed Federer Moments. These are times, as you watch the young Swiss play, when …
A Body of Athletics: An Introduction to the Possibilities of Sport
Before every basketball game, from rec league to high school, my mother told me, Knock ‘em dead. She never said, Good luck. * When Prairie Schooner asked me to solicit twenty to forty pages of writing for a “sports themed” issue, I was in a castle in Umbria, Italy, reading Pedro Salinas, writing poems and …
Swimming in the Rain by Chana Bloch
Chana Bloch. Swimming in the Rain: New and Selected Poems, 1980–2015. Autumn House Press. If the current American poetry world divides into “barrelers” and “lingerers,” as poet and critic Dan Chiasson has put it, then Chana Bloch’s Swimming in the Rain: New and Selected Poems, 1980–2015, places her among the fine lingerers. She continues after …