Prose
On War Writing: A Roundtable Discussion with Donald Anderson, Doug Anderson, Matt Gallagher, Sam Hamill, Peter Molin, Marilyn Nelson, and Stacey Peebles
Gathered here around a virtual table is an eclectic assembly of thinkers who offer their responses to a series of questions and issues connected to the literature of war. DON A: Donald Anderson / DOUG A: Doug Anderson / MG: Matt Gallagher / SH: Sam Hamill / PM: Peter Molin / MN: Marilyn Nelson / SP: Stacey …
A Walking Guide to the Heart of a City
In Nazareth an excavation of the ancient city lies underneath the ground. One can walk some of the old streets on Plexiglas platforms or descend into the ruins. Just outside the walls of the Old City of Jerusalem excavations commence in the Arab town of Silwan, believed now to be the actual ancient city of David, …
Paradise in Zurita: An Interview with Raúl Zurita
I can tell you that Raúl Zurita was born in Santiago, Chile, in 1950. That he studied engineering, then became a poet. That his early works were poignant responses to Augusto Pinochet’s 1973 military coup. That he was arrested at six in the morning on September 11, 1973, and beaten. That he was a founding member of …
Election Supervisor, Bosnia
I don’t remember the name of the city or who was shooting at whom. Instead, I see the shimmer of the toilet bowl, its pearl-like shine. Eighteen years after the fact, I’m still on the floor trying to curl my shoulders behind white porcelain. A foreign correspondent once told me that bathrooms are the safe …
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 …
Wrong Number
The phone rings, and it’s a woman with her backbone up because she knows—don’t think she doesn’t—that I was with her man last night. Better keep myself distant from him, she warns, better stay away from her Buzzard, or else she’ll be forced to put the hurt on me, swear to God, just see if …
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 …