Matthew Pennock, Sudden Dog. Alice James Books, 2012. Paperback, 76 pp, $15.95. Coming up on my twenty-first semester of higher education, I often apologetically …
James Tadd Adcox, The Map of the System of Human Knowledge. Tiny Hardcore Press, 2012. Paperback, 138 pp, $12. When we were boys, my brother and I cut brown paper bags …
Cathy Park Hong, Engine Empire. W.W. Norton & Company, 2012. Hardcover, 96 pp, $24.95. Concerned with frontiers of economics, language, culture, and technology, …
Mary Ruefle, Madness, Rack, & Honey . Wave Books, 2012. Paperback, 352 pp, $25. The poet-critic: that vital hybrid, the one who persists in existing despite …
Such Hunger: A Review of Eduardo C. Corral's Slow Lightning Sophie Klahr Eduardo C. Corral, Slow Lightning. Yale University Press, 2012. Paperback, 96 pp, $18. …
Elena Passarello, Let Me Clear My Throat. Sarabande Books, 2012. Paperback, 240 pp, $15.95. “You don’t get to have a voice,” an eminent poet once shouted at me …
Michel Stone, The Iguana Tree . Hub City Press, 2012. Hardcover, 220 pp, $24.95. It’s not easy to write from a cultural perspective that’s different from one’s …
This roundtable brings together a number of prominent Latin@ writers. The term “Latin@,” which signifies both Latinos and Latinas, is a semiotic gesture by Latinidad scholars intended to mitigate …
How many sentences do you need to sink a kayak Welcome to my list of necessarily unanswerable questions Dear person I am writing this for your morning urgency of light For whatever questions about …
Wendy Xu is the author of You Are Not Dead , selected by Michael Dumanis from the 2012 Cleveland State University Poetry Center first book contest, to be published in 2013. She is also the author …
I replace the pan of water on the radiator in my sleep. I know this because I wake standing by the fogged window upon which I’ve transparently written: REFILL RADIATOR PAN. CHECK. There are parts …
Come listen to the coyotes, you say, your voice a smudge of ash in the Iowa night. I hear the encroaching yips, the bellow of a frightened cow, though I do not admit this. We agreed not to shout …
Ryan Teitman is the author of the poetry collection Litany for the City (BOA Editions 2012), selected by Jane Hirshfield for the A. Poulin Jr. Poetry Prize. His poems have appeared in Ninth …
A bird is a kind of island. In flight, a flock is called an archipelago . At rest, a peninsula . When two flocks meet, they are called a communion . Used in a sentence: Two flocks met and …
The question of whether the idea of America is dead is not a question. A question by its definition does not cease to exist in the language. You hear spoken by those who ask it. This is why the dead, …
Jacques J. Rancourt is currently a Wallace Stegner Poetry Fellow at Stanford University. His poems have appeared or will appear in New England Review , Beloit Poetry Journal , Colorado Review …
Two people who are honest for the first time speak honestly to each other. There are flocks of sheep herding dogs inside me. There are lovers I’ve pared with knives from apples. This …
Detroiter Jamaal May is the author of Hum (Alice James Books 2013), winner of the Beatrice Hawley award, as well as two chapbooks, The Whetting of Teeth and The God Engine . His poems have …
Hmm... drags at the back of a throat, occasionally becomes mmmhmm... when three men huddle around a car, admitting some smaller defeat, while not quite admitting the emergence of digital parts …
Ada Limón is the author of three books of poetry, including Lucky Wreck (Autumn House Press 2006), This Big Fake World (Pearl Editions 2007), and Sharks in the Rivers (Milkweed Editions …
I like the lady horses best, how they make it all look easy, like running 40 miles per hour is as fun as taking a nap, or grass. I like their lady horse swagger, after winning. Ears up, girls, ears …
When the rat had come back to the attic and woke him to its scratching at the poison he’d laid that would be its bane for sure he felt no pity for a death that had to happen but …
Eamon Grennan taught for many years in the English Department of Vassar College. Currently he teaches in the graduate writing program of Columbia. His latest collections are Out of Sight: New and …
Elizabeth Barnett graduated from NYU’s Creative Writing Program and is now working on a PhD at Vanderbilt. Her poems have appeared in Harpur Palate and are forthcoming in Slice .
Elizabeth Barnett graduated from NYU’s Creative Writing Program and is now working on a PhD at Vanderbilt. Her poems have appeared in Harpur Palate and are forthcoming in Slice .
Everyone asks what it sounds like. It does and does not sound like a freight train; it rumbles, but the high notes of the rails are missing, the click and clatter and screech. It does and does not …
I lived in Madison, Wisconsin, on a narrow spit of land between two lakes. The actual word for this land formation is an isthmus, but no one who is not a crossword puzzle champion or a resident of …
I’ve got to talk fast if I’m going to get through this, through enough of the history behind all of this that maybe you’ll understand what this is about. I am doing the plank—a yoga position …
1969 Honda CL 125 Scrambler, maroon and chrome, an on-off road bike with a high exhaust and skid plates: my dad’s last motorcycle and my earliest memory. He took the helmetless kids on the block …
Two deer emerged out of the thick upper woods of my parents’ farm, a place my father and brother called the Slashing. For two weeks, I had waited for this moment. Since the cold opening morning of …
One boy, Nyson, was moon-faced and dull-eyed and never closed his mouth all the way, his slug of a tongue perpetually protruding. He arrived early to my classroom and lingered in a wistful, patient …
First came the Bridge of Grocery Tins in Terre Haute. For months, Meredith picked through dumpsters as far north as Clinton and as far south as Farmersburg, even across the Illinois line. She loved …
Weeks, he’d been collecting his thoughts, and now he had them. They were caught in two suitcases, one flannel with a zipper, the other black with brass piping and buckles that clicked when they …
There was nothing particularly ominous about the day the Earth disintegrated. It was a Tuesday, and John and Jane were in the car on their way to visit their son. They had done so every other …
Lexa’s mother had always been funny, but cancer put her over the top. “Intestine pieces are no big deal,” she said in month six of a six-month sentence. “It’s my uterus I miss most. Now …
The gym stands on one side of the hall, Mr. Gates’s class on the other, and every day, after first period, the girls finishing PE and the boys finishing Bible meet in the middle, twisting …
1. I have something to tell you, a secret. I don’t want to tell you, not really, but something, or perhaps someone, is trying to make me. This thing …
There was brick and there was sun. There were floorboards of stained pine. There were water circles from where terracotta pots full of cacti had been, and leaked. The sun went down and people came. …
These are debates into both the philosophy and the physics. They can be heated, the way other couples might argue over politics, money, or infidelity. But those have never been our problems. Our …
When children lose their wings, the compartment opens briefly at the crux of disintegration, in the tender upper back. You’ve seen the space that remains on sunny days at public beaches or when …
We are told we live in a brief world. Our diminishing attention spans underwrite this as we click and click, birds between bushes, the brain between buzzes. Some days it’s all in flux, and we know …
