One by one by one / our bones come to meet you— / it’s an open house day, / we meet-and-greet new guests
(Jewish poetry)
Do you see the world / as anything more than a translucent sheet lifted / by Divine breath?
(Jewish poetry)
“Really it was like possession . . . Renata is her own complete being as far as my psyche and processes know,” Frank X. Gaspar tells Millicent Borges Accardi.
“Hosking writes about her father,” says reviewer Catherine Faurot, “but his presence is felt more as a fading afterimage, a hole in the film burning incandescently.”
(poetry review)
“My son’s mind had turned against him but the need for process moved him through a different portal,” Miriam Feldman tells Tanya Ward Goodman.
[More than a year after COVID’s US arrival, ACM looks back.]
I can tell you that I saw an old couple walking their dog. Have I never seen this before?
(nonfiction)
His guilt was such a constant companion that a serious argument could be made for the carpool lane, the last few days rushing him like oncoming cars.
(fiction)
content warning: rape and other violent assault
At the toll, I ask, Is the tunnel very long? I’m claustrophobic in tunnels, enclosed spaces. Can’t even drive a car into a car wash.
(nonfiction)
My peoples came in on the Salvation Army ticket, right? Two rooms and a toaster, that’s about it.
(drama)
in the center of my heart they buried a limewood carving of a bird.
(poetry)
“Ghost poems of a haunted landscape, told in almost hypnotic lyricism, somehow bleed seamlessly into haunted writers and artists suffering in landscapes far from the West,” writes Sadie Hoagland.
(poetry reviews)
[A year after COVID’s US arrival, ACM looks back.]
We found a way of existing where we didn’t have to know who lived and who died.
(nonfiction)
With each video, I knew Pete was getting closer to his death. I never believed he would make it out alive.
(nonfiction)
“I overcome the tension of trying to write by cooking. Next to smell, taste is the strongest sense in terms of conveying emotions,” Maggie Kast tells Jan English Leary.
[A year after COVID’s US arrival, ACM looks back.]
It’s not as if we don’t all know what we’re there for.
(nonfiction)
This is, in one sense, all of us talking. Although you’re not in a context at the moment where you were expecting to speak.
(drama)
I had the gun now because it made me feel safe for myself, Dean, and the rest of the monitors at this poll site. It made me feel safe in the way that the president’s people were made to feel safe when he exercised his gun-lobby muscle and equivocated about good people being on “both sides” of an incendiary protest scenario.
(nonfiction)
It’s while waiting for the light at the corner of Twenty-eighth and Sixth Avenue that you first hear it: a soft hissing sound.
(fiction)
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)
