maybe we’ve got it wrong postponing fire dowsing the stone earth for whitewater whelping green and breathe how breathtaking the last river in estrus dried a centipede seen from above fern fen and fringe of locust and its honey —From “heavenly body . . .
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Photo by Stacie Pottinger of Rogue Studios There are so many waysof burning things, butnot many of containingthe flames they becomethat last. —From “When I Discovered Sacrifice by Fire,” Volume 60, issue 3 (Fall 2019) Tell us about one of the first pieces you wrote.“Detour, Missouri” was really a goodbye to a . . .
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I know you less and less,but forgive your miscalculations, the distances you thought you might travel,and your desire to be good. Time grows between usWith a mechanical agency. —From “To My Younger Self,” Volume 60, Issue 3 (Fall 2019) Tell us about one of the first pieces you wrote.When I was nine . . .
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“I came back warm from a long winter run to find my daughter on the couch, feet raised, arm wrapped in a wet towel, a glass of chocolate milk on the end table where her father’s ashes used to be.” —from “Dark Smoke Rose,” Volume 60, Issue 3 (Fall 2019) Tell us . . .
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One hundred and one years since the end of the First World War, militarism still pervades American culture, and our collective amnesia about our own history puts the world at great risk. In 1973, the year American forces pulled out of Vietnam, Kurt Vonnegut wrote, about the end of WWI: “It was . . .
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A review of Odes to Lithium by Shira Erlichman (Alice James Books, 2019) There’s something apt about the fact that Shira Erlichman’s Odes to Lithium arrived in the world in 2019. That’s because this year is the 25th anniversary of Elizabeth Wurtzel’s landmark book, Prozac Nation, while Kay Redfield Jamison and Annie G. Rogers, psychologists who both . . .
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But her features were falling off her face and her lap was sliding off her legs and her voice shifted, as if the ground were dropping away, and she slipped inside her skin a little, as if the mask were too big, and the air rippled with voices and the clatter of . . .
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What’s an elegy for Abraham Lincoln doing in a 12-ounce beer bottle? The third Walt Whitman tribute in Bell’s Leaves of Grass Series reinvents the poet’s preferred beer style as a confluence of American Black Ale and India Pale Lager. Bringing roasty malts and Michigan hops to lager’s crispness, Bell’s Brewery labels O Captain! My Captain! a . . .
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A review of Houses from Another Street by Michael Thurston, Leveller’s Press, 2019. I have a confession to make, one that will likely get me in trouble. Come to think of it, the water I’m walking into here is even hotter than it normally would be. As it happens, our most senior fiction . . .
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Art: “Examination of a Witch,” Thompkins H. Matteson, 1853, detail. Peabody Essex Museum, Salem, MA. Perhaps I stayed up too late. Perhaps I didn’t need to go downstairs right at midnight to look up the Witch of Hadley (my little town—the farming community between Amherst and Northampton, home to prime farmland, big . . .
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