Freddy’s Vacation
I Excursion, corrects my father, who is a hunter. He is standing over a basin in our shack, pressing freshly butchered venison into salt, and the finger he lifts from the salt cake makes it clear not a … Read More
The Anthropologist Problem
In the official texts that the villagers had permitted me to read, there was never a strict age requirement. What mattered was that the candidates were elders—re-tellers of stories, slow morning walkers, birdhouse watchers, coin-behind-your-ear jokesters, narrators of the … Read More
Shared Solitudes: The Mother House by Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin and Still Life by Ciaran Carson
The Mother House by Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin (Wake Forest University Press, 2020). Still Life by Ciaran Carson (Wake Forest University Press, 2020). Since the Covid-19 pandemic has fundamentally changed so many aspects of our lives, it stands to … Read More
Kontemporary Amerikan Love Song: Kontemporary Amerikan Poetry: Poems by John Murillo
Kontemporary Amerikan Poetry: Poems by John Murillo (Four-Way Books, 2020). Kontemporary Amerikan Poetry: Poems, John Murillo’s second collection, is constructed in the vein of a craft-book, and nearly every poem can be read on several levels—as literary criticism, … Read More
The Haunting Absence of Wayétu Moore: The Dragons, the Giant, the Women: A Memoir by Wayétu Moore
The Dragons, the Giant, the Women: A Memoir by Wayétu Moore (Graywolf Press, 2020). The pages of the immensely talented Wayétu Moore’s memoir The Dragons, the Giant, the Women are resonant with absence. “We are told that all … Read More
We’ll Play to an Empty Room, Eli Tells Us
Ten till showtime this old friend of yours takes us backstage to meet the band and strum a few verses, hoping to stall till a crowd shows up, and in his hat and boots, with his big-buckled jeans and … Read More
Birds Again
in memory of my student, 2000-2019 After last spring’s surprise grackle attack and the autumn squirrels’ burgling acrobatics I almost didn’t fill the feeders this year. They came back, the heavy-set doves content to peck what … Read More
Smokestack
Sometimes I think the gods want something else. Enough with the libations, they might cry (if it weren’t for the prohibition on two-way speech). Don’t gore that ox on my account! Out my office window is a red … Read More