My friend John and I shared a seat on Bus 77. I needed both arms and sometimes a leg to wrestle my trombone onto the bus, but John could manage it with just one hand. John signed my fifth-grade...
OO EE AH. A’BIGGITY BIGGITY BOO I—got a fever. And the only cure for it. Is a suicide note. Wrapped in the flensed flesh headdress of a book review I criticize I...
And there was given to it a mouth with which to speak great things and blasphemies. And there was given to it, too, authority, and hierarchy, and men and women worshipping. This was the dream of...
At the grocery store today— these meteors and angels, wise men and all the beautiful hallucinations of December, wearing the masks of the Ordinary, the Annoyed, the Tired. The Disturbed. The Sane....
There is a horse with a face made of flies. There is wet shale, a porch, a storm. You are checking your body for ticks. The moonlight glazes your skin as you turn in the mirror, no red apertures...
Tonight you are a mile of black weeds. You are a crow with a beak full of smoke on the move over the river. Tonight I shave my head and nail a baggy of hair above my door. I walk by the light of my...
It is the bread that will not be baked. The bread that rises and continues to rise. It is the recital performed every night— Little girl in a snowstorm in an empty auditorium. Not the soldier on...
This year’s recipient of the National Book Award in Nonfiction is Katherine Boo, for Behind the Beautiful Forevers: Life, Death, and Hope in a Mumbai Undercity. In...
While I won’t reveal where I come down on the question of whether Frederick Seidel is “the best poet we have” in contemporary American poetry, I think anyone familiar with his career would...