Nonfiction
The Beginning of the End of Hummingbird Cake
In the pineapple is the fiber we’ve been looking for, the sweet yellow threadiness we’d never confuse for stitches, for wound. In the banana is the quickening rot, the rot being the softest, sweetest stage of the fruit. *This is not Hawaii. There are no resorts here. We swim in no ocean but in One …
Sharon Olds. Stag’s Leap. Knopf.
Sharon Olds’s most recent collection of poems, Stag’s Leap, winner of the 2012 T. S. Eliot Prize for Poetry, tells the story of the breakup of the poet’s thirty-year marriage. Olds, a seasoned confessional poet whose first book, Satan Says, was published in 1980, is the first American woman to win the T. S. Eliot …
Jose Saramago. The Lives of Things. Verso Press.
Originally released in 1978 as Objecto Quase, the recently re-released The Lives of Things is an intriguing collection of short stories written by Nobel Laureate Jose Saramago, perhaps Portugal’s most famous, if not most rebellious, author. While best known for his relatively recent novels The Gospel According to Jesus Christ (1991), Blindness (1995), and …
The Divine Auditor
It is still dark when my cell phone begins to buzz. When I flip it open, my mother’s voice comes through a connection often interrupted by the apartment building’s iron girders. We make some awkward small talk and then she says: “I guess you want to talk about the email you sent me last …
Fight, Bull
A friend of mine, a longhaired, bearded carpenter, told me a story about a time he boarded a city bus in Fresno, California, and nearly resorted to violence —the kind of violence they write stories about in the daily paper. Your memory isn’t even working normally. It could happen to you or to me. It …
Adrienne Rich. Last Poems: Selected and New, 1971-2012. W. W. Norton.
In her poem “Delta” Adrienne Rich writes, “If you think you can grasp me, think again: / my story flows in more than one direction / a delta springing from the riverbed / with its five fingers spread.” I have always noted those lines as both a warning and an invitation. Her final book, Later …
How to Own a Building
Winner of the 2012 Prairie Schooner Summer Creative Nonfiction Essay Contest, selected by Judge Steven Church (Runners-up: Kirby Wright, “Ladder of Glass,” and Garrett J. Brown, “Galileo in the Uecker Seats”) [New York City] For years, people saw only the ugly rectangular shapes, like two steel pillars hoisting the sky. Too tall, uninventive. Architecture should …
To the Whirlwinds
It was on their second lap around Tsézhinii’áhí when the skies rapidly darkened. Late May and Red Valley hadn’t yet had much rain. But it was always this way. Always dry, even up to the tips of the mountains. Rain, when it does storm, falls so briefly in the valley that within the length of …
CATHY PARK HONG. ENGINE EMPIRE.
The existence of ‘‘smart’’ snow that ‘‘monitors you,’’ staring, watching, studying. Being online constantly, 24/7, and merely having to blink your eyes to go off. Flying aerocabs. Antique ringtones that remind one of a time when it was all so much simpler. Everywhere, a complete erasure of the ‘‘old realism.’’ Cathy Park Hong’s latest collection, …