“She’d come to California a couple weeks before, staying with her brother, reminding me of how my mom relied, at times, on my Uncle Ken.” (nonfiction)
“How could // the hand’s reflexive twitch undo centuries of survival? / Something as simple as an approaching outlier of thunder // cause devastation to a thing come so far?” (poetry)
“Sunbeams drop and scatter / like shrapnel across bald pavingstones asizzle / in the dust of your passing.” (poetry)
“Every day their breath brushes back and forth / like wind erosion over the etched inscriptions / that say our veterans are our heroes,” (poetry)
“Chicago, / I’ll stick around as long as you’ll take me or leave me.” (poetry)
“we gently break their beacons from our ankles / caress the skin where now the signals stop” (poetry)
“what can somewhere provide beside a concrete babbling brook / with loose boulders” (poetry)
“It had crushed her trailer / while she watched / Queen for a Day / on a TV crowned with rabbit ears.” (poetry)
“Robber barons are laughing themselves silly as they devour your / neighbors. / Don’t worry. / It’s not you they are after.” (poetry)
“Wandering around some post-nuke safari park / With cauliflower growing out of my arm / Like a freak at night” (poetry)
“little teeth of pinion, / gears of language / spinning in your mouth” (poetry)
I did not live any of my life in a literary community. Holding an array of different jobs for almost thirty years, I used to think I could publish my resume as a novel, Sari Rosenblatt tells Avani Kalra.
Carol Ann Davis makes us ache in these essays and lets the quiet moments explode within our hearts, writes reviewer S.T. Brant (nonfiction reviews)
On our / walk the hound and I / noted something fecund (poetry)
What are the whereabouts of this babble of tongues, / this suicide flight of words, / this hermit-crab that is my story? (poetry)
Only the life of a human being has meaning, but we cannot decide what that meaning is. (nonfiction)
Years passed. The joke continued. So did the dustings. (nonfiction)
Malé is now the besieged capital of the submerged Maldives, built up precariously on the ruins of oil tanks and docking derricks, apartment blocks and concrete breakwaters. (fiction)
Walking changed her. (nonfiction)
“Who knew so many people needed relationship advice from lawyers?” (drama)
“several layers of antagonism stare at us / amidst a squabbling paradox or cannibalism.” (poetry)
I could pretend I didn’t watch at least a thousand hours of television since March, but I’m sure I did. I mean, how many walks can a person take? (nonfiction)
“Her keys might have opened the church, and she the one to serve sponge fingers like death.” (the loop)
“The great achievement of Cracked Piano is that its poems present psychological pictures of a person in loneliness,” writes reviewer John Zheng. (poetry reviews)
“She spends her days tending the grapes, and she runs a little gift shop in the village…Now that she’s simplified her relationships with people, she seems even healthier, even more herself.” (fiction)
“It was deemed very unfeminine to play the bridegroom…Girls would tease you and provoke you like a real bridegroom and laugh at your expense.” (fiction)
“‘You waltz in here, a first-time patient, and act like we owe you something.'” (drama)
“Out west, we get our sunlight second hand, / when the East has settled the business of the day.” (poetry)
So now what are we going to do? (nonfiction)
“Mental illness is not trivial, not something that should be easy to write or read or talk about, and it’s important that she included elements…that might come off as excessive or overwhelming,” writes reviewer Hannah Page. (poetry review)
“The invisible turns home into battlegrounds and destroys the romance between man and woman. These details never make it to history books.” (nonfiction)
“‘with boys comes a lot of stress. You worry about how you can buy him his own place, or you worry about who he’ll bring into your house.'” (fiction)
“a cacophony of voices inquiring, wanting to disentangle the mysteries of the tattoos like hieroglyphs, pictograms.” (fiction)
“The last traces / of what I have lived, / of what I have loved, / are vanishing at the mercy of the wind.” (poetry)
“The poet’s love-hate relationship with her laptop becomes fully realized in ‘Off the Web,’ as too much time on the internet leads to feeling ‘my dress / gather headwinds and swirl, then lift
like / Marilyn’s over a grate,'” writes Richard Holinger. (review)
My brother, sister, and I climbed the steps of the fire escape at the local hospital, and our dad opened the door from the inside as we snuck into our mother’s room one by one, all too young to officially visit our mother. (nonfiction)
“You did not talk politics, except / to tell me we were being watched” (poetry)
“Weird fantastic beings of a / Super-intelligence. Ruling a race of synthetic humans / and pitting them against mankind’s dream.” (poetry)
“What’s wrong with circles? What shape is your wedding ring?” (drama)
“Faris’s book warns Republicans of their party’s coming apocalypse, but I think the Democratic Party should take note too,” writes Nick Rueth. (reviews)
“While the rest of the department read books, wrote papers, and graded student work, Tim and Rick printed out pictures of clowns.” (nonfiction)
“my mouth is full of blood, like a poppy growing in my mouth, it tastes like…the pennies I used to throw in wishing wells,” Content Warning: Sexual Assault (fiction)
I’ve chosen to work with concrete to speak about the impulse to create permanent structures, but also to speak about impermanence, change, and loss, Ledelle Moe tells Helena Feder.
“Geter’s lines don’t so much hum as slice, visually cutting into the page like claws digging for answers in a ground that will not give,” writes reviewer Phillip B. Williams.
“Her mother continued to hand her things: that lost dollar, a Chinese cookie fortune, one missing pearl earring.” (fiction)
“in soft squares, you try to neglect / your worries and shut down / the war-voices,” (Poetry)
There is no such thing as old water, but when I answered, “I’m as old as water,” my son’s eyes grew wide. He says that because water cycles, it’s all super old. (fiction)
O, America, a horse like us would have been glue by now. (nonfiction)
