When Buddha said silence is an emptyspace & space is the home of the awakened mind, he hadn’t yet crossed his legs& held his spine both firm & calm in the smoke-filled avocado kitchenof my small girlhood.—from “Cuffing Season” by Lisa Fay Coutley, Volume 64, Issue 2 (Summer 2023) Tell us about one of . . .
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Countryside in Algeria, photo by Giacomo Sartori (Earth Primer #3) Cultivated soil is very fragile—just a bit of water running over the surface is capable of stripping away its thin upper layers, which are the most rich and fertile. The soil is then deposited at the base of the slopes, where the . . .
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Today, summer is over.Today, everybody is readyfor autumn’s crimson sleight of hand. Everybody wants to peeloff a green dress, flirt with the bittertemperature, get into a fight. —from “Rosh Hashanah” by Mónica Gomery, Volume 64, Issue 2 (Summer 2023) Tell us about one of the first pieces you wrote.I wrote constantly as a kid. . . .
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Mycorrhiza mushroom: Photo by Backpackerin, Pixabay (Earth Primer # 2) Unconsciously, we associate soil with life, because we’ve had the experience of observing the critters that live there: insects, ants, glassy larvae, light little spiders, snails, worms. A swarm of life that somewhat repels us, it is very distant from the ideal . . .
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Bob Hicok’s Water Look Away has been published with Copper Canyon Press. Hicok was our 2007 Anne Halley Poetry Prize winner and has been published multiple times in MR, most recently in Volume 59, Issue 2. Sally Wen Mao The Kingdom of Surfaces is out now with Graywolf Press. A portfolio of her poems was featured . . .
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I was, and continue to be, impatient. During the rests, I never counted properly, always stumbling forward to get to the next note. I didn’t understand how a song worked, how to contextualize notes and phrases, the arc of a piece. When I performed, I relied on muscle memory: if you stopped . . .
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Photo courtesy of Giacomo Sartori (Earth Primer #1) When I travel around, giving lectures on soil, I ask my listeners—who sometimes are children—how deep it is. In response, some people say a mile or two, others say hundreds of yards. They all imagine it limitless; you can tell by the seriousness in . . .
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I never gave Judaism much thought until college. I happened upon a seminar on the Jewish theologian Abraham Joshua Heschel, who argues that holiness can be located not within space but across time, with each cycle of weeks binding us to the moment of creation. Enchanted by this idea, I started to . . .
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A Review of The Sea Elephants by Shastri Akella (Flatiron Books, 2023) “Once upon a time,” reads sixteen-year-old protagonist Shagun in a book of Hindu myths at the outset of Shastri Akella’s earnest and aching debut novel, The Sea Elephants, “the gods took away the first ancestor of the sea elephants, coveting him for his . . .
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Photo courtesy of Giacomo Sartori N.B. With this post, we inaugurate a weekly series penned by the brilliant Italian novelist and soil scientist Giacomo Sartori. We’ll be posting a new column each Friday, so stay tuned! Wars are as unfortunate for the earth as they are for people. The aerial footage from . . .
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