Prose
The Shadow
Joshua Leon felt his body tense in his uniform as the plane jangled to the drop point, and the rest of his unit held onto their seats. The flurry of the aircraft carrier was behind them, and now they were concentrating for the mission, the blue waters of the Caribbean turning over below them. There were …
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 …
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 …
Corzo
One day when I was in the seventh grade, I came home to my father—Eduvigo Herrera III—cutting his heart out with a steak knife. He was sitting at the little kitchen table when I got home from school, his hand in a ragged chest wound the size of a plum. "Mija, I need you to …
Lion
When the old man died, I laid him out in the bathtub because he was small and neatly fit. I took him by the ankles first and then, moving slowly toward his neck, gently scrubbed him down. I lifted him at the back and washed his ribs all the way around until he was like …
Emergency Brake by Ruth Madievsky, Tavern Books, 2016.
Lungs, throats, doors: these images recur throughout Emergency Brake, the debut collection from poet Ruth Madievsky. Each names a portal, an opening where smoke or speech or someone may pass between inside and outside. "I think the body is a door," muses one poem’s speaker. Emergency Brake makes brilliant use of this insight, that to …
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 …