Nonfiction
Limber by Angela Pelster
Angela Pelster. Limber. Sarabande Books. Trees are the subject of Angela Pelster’s debut essay collection, Limber. Pine trees and poplar trees, sycamores and saskatoons, fig trees, maple trees, trees outside the essayist’s window and trees as far off, theoretically, as the moon. While the title Limber seems to conflate the words, “lumber” and “timber,” it …
Prelude to Bruise by Saeed Jones
Saeed Jones. Prelude to Bruise. Coffee House Press. Saeed Jones’s first full-length book, Prelude to Bruise, is a necessary piece of contemporary poetry that bravely tackles issues such as abuse, promiscuity, homosexuality, and racism. Though the title hints at an agonizing inevitability, the collection implies that a bruise may, in fact, denote healthy progress. Jones’s …
The Night We’re Not Sleeping In by Sean Bishop
Sean Bishop. The Night We’re Not Sleeping In. Sarabande Books. Sean Bishop’s debut collection, The Night We’re Not Sleeping In, begins as a musical contract: “The signed agrees to breath, to the lungs’ soggy bellows” (“Terms of Service”). It quickly becomes clear that, for the speaker, the bargain we’ve struck is about waking to the …
It Will End with Us by Sam Savage
Sam Savage. It Will End with Us. Coffee House Press. Sam Savage’s latest novel, It Will End with Us, reads as part narrative and part philosophical meditation on memory and language. The novel’s first-person narrator, Eve, is haunted by the singular childhood event of her mother’s disintegrating sanity. Eve is an elderly woman, living with …
Coming To: A Lexicology of Fainting
1. vein From Old French veine, from Latin vena. The earliest senses were blood vessel and small natural underground channel of water. See also: blood, artery, channel, the channeling of the dead. It’s a wake, we are told, my cousin and I, but we hear it like one word: awake. Who is doing the waking? …
Eleven Stories of Water and Stone
Winner of the 2014 Prairie Schooner Summer Creative Nonfiction Essay Contest, selected by judge Judith Ortiz Cofer The aim of water treatment is to produce and maintain water that is hygienically safe, aesthetically attractive and palatable, in an economic manner. Manual of Water Supply and Treatment, Ministry of Urban Development, New Delhi, India 1. Maybe …
Alicia Ostriker. The Old Woman, the Tulip, and the Dog. University of Pittsburgh Press.
In her new collection The Old Woman, the Tulip, and the Dog, Alicia Suskin Ostriker brings together a trio of voices—each a living thing, each mortal and yet calling out its truths in a clear tenor. These three voices, extraordinary in their ordinariness, build conversations that whirl around each topic. They catch angles of consideration …
Call My Name
When I was seven, my sea captain father at sea, my mother a strobing lighthouse of missing, I stood alone in my bedroom, renaming all my toys Melissa. You, and you, and you. A child’s narcissism, maybe. A punishment for my dolls. I didn’t choose my name, but I could choose to give it away. …
Review: Afaa Michael Weaver. The Government of Nature. University of Pittsburgh Press.
At the end of his poem ‘‘The Impossible,’’ a poem that unflinchingly recounts a memory of sexual abuse, Bruce Weigl writes, ‘‘Say it clearly and you make it beautiful, no matter what.’’ I’ve always had a contentious relationship with this line—feeling both its truth and its impossibility at the same time, and, of course, that’s …