It's May 16, 2016, the 50th anniversary of the Chinese Cultural Revolution, and I am reading Ocean Vuong's Night Sky with Exit Wounds. In a recent NPR interview, Vuong explained that his new book is …
Author of more than a dozen books of fiction, nonfiction, and poetry, Phillip Lopate currently teaches at Columbia University, where he directs the graduate program in nonfiction. In the early …
...am I uproarious. This tiny mosquito in the morning if this tiny mosquito soars up in the morning 1 fingernail high over the breakfast-table while the rain, then this tiny mosquito disappears its …
Everything is in all things, I repeat as I thumb through my copy of The Art of Flight in search of the phrase. The five words enter my head like a mantra, a ritornello, a motto of ancient alchemists. …
"Is it hard?" I asked my childhood friend. I couldn't remember his name--the name of the baby she'd lost. I hadn't been close to her for years. Her arrival at the wilderness guard station where I …
A woman on a bicycle is wearing a red silk scarf next to a signpost where I once ate a split-open coconut smothered in lime juice. I click the arrow on my computer screen. The image shifts further …
Cheese melts in London like nowhere else. Old mixes with new like nowhere else. The city is blessed. But a girl can sob her heart out in London's streets and no one will stop, no one will raise an …
or lied about my feelings or calculated a response & why I mean why risk dismissal of a real self when you can create a façade one easily taken down & reconstructed why let people into your real …
I fold into the cold croissant of bed./ When he leaves I flutter open like a valve./ His wardrobe, my hangers, our chest/ of drawers. Possession tossed like a rule...
Sea-Witch held me after my formation. I cried in her arms & in her hair & went into her body through the entrance to her body, which is the ear. When I got there I met others for whom she had done …
A bird flew into the window. To me its wingspan seemed enormous. I ran out into the garden and on the path lay a large woodpecker. His beak was half open. The woodpecker was having trouble breathing. …
Sometimes it is hard to tell the difference between one's voice/ and one's voice// Out in the field are street, children are still learning/ from parents...
The young waiter at the back bar was happy that we had joined him and asked us what we wanted to drink. I asked if he had any tequila. Of course he did. It was a flamenco bar and a little balding man …
Marina Abramovi?: Before I met Tom I was reading his articles in Artforum, about Joseph Beuys and Yves Klein. His article on Yves Klein was one of the best articles I ever read. It was just mind …
Honoring the pedagogic legacy of Thomas McEvilley is a daunting task. It is made a little easier by knowing that I am not alone in the attempt: as times goes on, the impact of his scholarship has …
I never met Tom McEvilley face to face. Our personal acquaintance consisted of a few telephone conversations in the late 1980s or early 1990s. Somehow he learned that I had spent some time in India …
Not long before Donald Barthelme moved to New York and became known as one of the most exciting, innovative, and important writers of his time, he lived in his hometown of Houston and served as the …
Love drags a wheel-less suitcase/ tagged Risk, some town on a lake/ in former Yugoslavia. Miami rolls,// you say with a smile, but he takes/ that as advice...
On top of the water, the sky rippled thinly. Lake Macatawa was clear and cold that fall. My paddle cut through the surface, carving circles that spread outward, overlapping as they went. Eddies …
He leaves a note for her on the kitchen table. She's just spent the week in San Francisco with her mother, and the moment she walks in with her luggage, sweating, she sees the note pinned down by her …
The land is made of organic matters and rock and we are launching drills and bits deep into the wellbores. The flowback is rich with sediments, chemicals/ burn the land...
My father beat me with a lot of different things, but the thing I remember best was the hairdryer. My father loved that hair dryer. He used it every day. He had beautiful, flowing hair, much longer …
Margaret and Kennar kicked back a lot with the other thirteen couples after their day's work was done: his, out on the massive Ghawar oil field; hers, folding laundry and wringing diapers and …
nigga, tonight i'm bout to be too much// in this context the room is the nigga/ or maybe your reflection/ or the wood skinned sprites juking around your ankles/ & on top of shea butter/ or the whole …
Begin at end, at the beginning of a real winter, in the barn, up in the hayloft, alone. In Woods, Kansas, standing in the hayloft door, looking out across the bare December fields. Wrapped in a …
and even though this school's falling apart, is secretly rotting from the inside out, K'll still find the time to set aside his mop and bucket and tell anyone about the ghost, the ghost, little white …
For/ you, the/ first triangle:/ Father and Son and/ Holy Ghost, and you hear/ from everybody Southern fried in/ your life the devil be a master mimic--
When I met Rosson Crow at her Beachwood Canyon studio, the sheer vibrancy of her canvases--which look like film sets recently flattened by a steam roller, with beer cans and flowers, curtains and …
Kurt Schwitters once wrote, in his self-published periodical Merz (ca. 1920), "I pasted words and sentences together in poems in such a way that their rhythmic composition created a kind of drawing. …
I'm sitting next to a doctor at a dinner party/ at Daphne's apartment in Athens,/ and I bring up one of my favorite topics,/ which is words that cannot be translated...
One of the swans was murdered; he was stabbed in the night. Swans mate for life, so his mate grieved. She lay on the steps of the boardwalk that traced the pond, head bowed into her legs. Tourists …
GUILLERMO COTTO-THORNER was born in Puerto Rico in 1916 and migrated to New York City in 1938. In addition to publishing two novels, Manhattan Tropics (1951) and Gambeta (1971), Cotto-Thorner was a …
When I was a girl with a book in my hand I could go to a place so deep no one could follow. No one cared to, except my mother, an affectionate woman who smarted at her lack of companionship. She must …
The first time Juan Ruiz proposed to me, I was eleven years old, skinny and flat chested. I was half asleep, my frizzy hair had burst out from the rubber-band holding it together and my dress was on …
All things are an effort to prolong the inevitable./ For example, my deep concern when the kids call/ top bunk it means they've acquired innuendo./ They'll get there, if they haven't already...
In Storm Lake, Iowa, a public park is home to the Living Heritage Tree Museum--an assemblage of historic trees. Not the trees who themselves witnessed history, but their descendants--grown from …
Our thirtieth anniversary issue is full of poetry and prose that connects to and interrogates the past. National Book Award winner Robin Coste Lewis speaks through time to the first African-American …
