Recursions (2016 Fiction Prize)
The snake is back. It’s in the middle of the living room and it has taken a bite of its tail. It’s eating itself. Or maybe not eating, just…I don’t know, I don’t want to know. What has possessed … Read More
John Brown has dinner in Concord with Emerson, Thoreau & others
Red-blooded roast beef, ham, haunch Of venison, creamed corn, custard, Claret , it did not matter. They ate they knew not what; … Read More
A Poetry Reading with Alan Shapiro
Poet Alan Shapiro, author of numerous acclaimed poetry collections, including Reel to Reel, a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize, and Night of the Republic, a finalist for the National Book Award, will be reading at the Suffolk University Poetry Center … Read More
“One Day I’ll Give Up Remembering” Land Sparing by Gabriella Klein (Nightboat Books, 2015)
Most of the poems in Gabriella Klein’s wise and beautifully strange debut collection, Land Sparing, are spoken—as so many contemporary lyric poems are—from the point of view of a first-person speaker, an “I.” But what a capacious and compassionate … Read More
Ordinary Sins: Excommunicados: Stories by Charles Haverty (University of Iowa Press, 2015)
To a Catholic schoolchild—baptized, confirmed, slouch-shouldered at weekly masses and fully imbued with the weight of Catholic guilt—perhaps no threat is as solemnly terrifying as that of excommunication. To be cast out from a community that so thoroughly defines … Read More
Beautiful Doubt: A Manual for Living by Sharon Dolin (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2016)
Sharon Dolin’s latest collection of poems, Manual for Living, is ‘A Guide for the Perplexed’ written in a state of perplexity. Com-prised of three ekphrastic sections, Manual for Living presents three different sets of self-advice which the reader, along … Read More
Cicada Song
Spring rains had cut little gullies into the caliche topping beyond the cattle guard. Washed out the soil beneath right down to the hardpan. I got off my bike and followed the curves of the lane up the rise … Read More
The Leave-taking
That last night at home, Michael sat with his father at the fireside, barely an arm’s reach apart, the turf in the hearth between them burning shades of fox-fur and rose hip. Sean’s age lay heavy on frame and … Read More
Old Stonington, Connecticut: 1989
Each night at dusk we built our fire in the usual spot, back from the water’s edge, camouflaged by white-barked birches and scraggly pines. We sprawled our bodies across the rocks and logs that encircled this makeshift hearth. Finally, … Read More
Cattle Country
There was no warning when the cattle turned. Just an October day like any other. It was weaning season, and they were peeling the yearlings from their mothers, so maybe that’s what did it. But why that year, that … Read More