Athanasius Kircher, a seventeenth-century German Jesuit and self-styled “master of a hundred arts,” is credited with inventing the megaphone, a pre-cursor to the computer, and (perhaps) a cat piano. His intense curiosity about the …
The Listeners, by Leni Zumas. Tin House Books, 2012. $15.95, 352 pages.
In Leni Zumas’ debut novel, The Listeners, the narrator Quinn suffers the loss of her older sister—shot in her sleep after they switched places in a shared …
Contents May Have Shifted, by Pam Houston. Norton, 2012. $25.95, 303 pages.
I have been reading a lot of contemporary literature lately about helpless women. Women trapped in unhappy marriages, women in psych wards, women exploring their sexuality to …
Where the West Ends, by Michael Totten. CreateSpace, 2012. $19.95, 282 pages.
Where the West Ends is a collection of travel essays by the foreign correspondent and policy analyst Michael Totten, whose journeys here span thirteen countries. At times, …
Translated from Polish by Piotr Florczyk & Boris Dralyuk
Thaw. Oasis of rotten grass, of concrete; puddles.
A dirty snowman in the neighbor’s garden. In front of the house,
the neighbor himself: a shadow in overalls, chewed up by his …
Murder Ballad, by Jane Springer. Alice James Books, 2012. $15.95, 80 pages.
Billie Holiday presides over Jane Springer’s Murder Ballad, winner of the Beatrice Hawley Award. It’s not the public radio cliché of the flower-wearing chanteuse that shadows …
What We Ask of Flesh, by Remica Bingham. Etruscan Press, 2013. $14.00, 85 pages.
When we think of flesh, we think of the body, yet Remica Bingham asks us to reconsider the singularity of such an initial image. What …
We could have spent all day
on that esplanade watching citizens
set fire to our favorite bridge,
but we needed to master
our summer looks,
and how many landmarks
must be destroyed
before our thirst for belligerent
celebration is quelled?…
It seems everybody plays Arms these days.
Not that everybody should.
I once played Arms with a guy named Tommy Cassanova who was way better than me. He’d stolen a girl of mine back when we were in high school …
You do not believe me. Why won’t you believe me? Whose vengeance is it that keeps cursing me for my making an evermore ghastly investment in what’s to be made over to me from my more and more telling all? …