“Perhaps, academic criticism attacks the “feedback loop between critical theory and artistic practice” to unconsciously deflect attention from a fear common to literary critics: that the humanities have become a cerebral echo chamber in an institutional environment that privileges STEM fields, the corporate university, and its investment portfolios. This is the fear: . . .
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Who is that angel in Bernini’s whitemarble of St. Teresa? He’s so strange:her ecstatic communion is with God,not him, the winged sous chef who’ll tenderizeher flesh for the Master to come . . .—from “Sonnet with Ghost Writer and Syringe,” Winter 2017 (Vol. 58, Issue 4) Tell us about one of the . . .
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He asks me to buy him a drink, his face a mirror whose patina has erasedits reflection, features falling away like rust. I offer him my own, a drink whose nameI cannot remember but means dirt path in one of the dead languages I’ve studied.—from “The Day I Met the Hanged Man,” Winter . . .
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“I am curled into the barrel of the cannon, in the middle of the center ring on this hard-packed earth. Somewhere in the stands, my son Jonah is with his father, Kirk. And as I wait for my signal, for those two taps on the side of the barrel, I remember the . . .
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I had too much computer. And a bad case of quaint. Such as it was, time stood still and there I was with someone seemed half my age and less a quarter my hygiene. We walked to Emily Dickinson’s grave. We held hands; he said his fingers were empurpled from picking kale . . .
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“As she opens her front door, dressed perfectly with just a hint of retro, you see the blue flame of the samovar grumbling behind her down at the end of the hall. The tea, the smoked herring, the small talk meted out with the stately pace of a fairytale, create just the . . .
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“As she opens her front door, dressed perfectly with just a hint of retro, you see the blue flame of the samovar grumbling behind her down at the end of the hall. The tea, the smoked herring, the small talk meted out with the stately pace of a fairytale, create just the . . .
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November in our mouths,the cool stone taste of it.It is what we say when we say anything.All through the cemeterythere are pebbles on the graves.—from “Why Write About It,” Winter 2017 (Vol. 58, Issue 4) Tell us about one of the first pieces you wrote.I wrote a lot of stories as a . . .
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If I could make language simpler I would.Language says that each word equals somethingelse, but that’s not true. If I could makelanguage simpler, I would make an invisibleequals sign that extends through each of us . . . .—from “Human Pageant,” Winter 2017 (Vol. 58, Issue 4) Tell us about one of . . .
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“A blue eye, floating in still water, blood vessels showing in the yellow cornea. A small, white liquid ball gathering on the lower eyelid, ready to spill over at any moment. The eye, under slackened folds of skin, swung wildly and stared into my own. Now that the iris had half disappeared . . .
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