Time cuts me down like a clipped coin and I’m no longer sufficient unto myself. — Osip Mandelstam Cloud horses cross sun Think great death of fireflies Sit on cracked stoop counting deaths Tinnulus tinnitus Know gods aren’t meant to be weightless Alcuin of York found it easier loving beautiful creatures sweet scents & lovely sounds Here decades like days Trudge fulvid streets rustracked & full Full of submerged laughter....
Margaret is growing another boob. She suspects — she’s not entirely sure. For the past few weeks a lump, now the size of a kiwi, has been swelling between her right breast and armpit. Margaret first noticed it in the shower, back when it was a very slight bump. It didn’t feel hard like she imagined a tumor would feel, which is why she left it alone, assuming that it...
Years ago, as an intern at an English-language publication that champions translated literature, I asked the editor how he dealt with the thorny issue of “translation style.” He looked at me, puzzled. “What’s that?” It was my turn to be tongue-tied. “It’s a quality… permeating a work of translation… that immediately tells you it is a translated text.” He didn’t get it. I let the topic drop. I later realized...
We called him Thomas, never Tommy, because Tommy Guns were the weapons of gangsters and no amount of yearning on our parts could make a Red Ryder air rifle so cool. Thomas used no gunpowder, and his metal BBs only penetrated human skin when fired at point-blank range. But he did have a lever action and a beautiful hardwood stock, and these things, taken together, seemed capable of convincing the...
In October 2023, Bloomsbury began to republish titles from the vaunted African Writers Series, an imprint that published 359 books between 1962 and 2003. Put out by the London-based publishing house Heinemann, most of the early AWS entries were originally written in English, but soon translations from other languages into English appeared. The AWS sought to establish a center for African writers, ensuring they were read in countries other than...
According to one narrative that has cohered since the 2024 election, the failure of Kamala Harris’s campaign can be chalked up to the political effects of inflation. After all, voters were more concerned about the economy, per Gallup, than they had been in any election year since 2008; by dismissing economic concerns and focusing on Donald Trump’s threat to democracy, Democrats grossly miscalculated. It seems clear, in retrospect, that “Bidenomics”...
Just when I think I am dead, I see horses in the next yard, glistening. Their bones crack like glow sticks. They honk up ethereal snot, spit pearls into the pool. The minute I hear them pounding down the street, I forgive their stench, their eagerness to deceive. I forget how they left, how they gambled my fortune to dust. What providence! The Lord let them return, velour skin stinking...
So when context becomes the new content, CONTEXT COLLAPSE cannot be far behind. And after? What would postcontextual Poetry even look like? Ask Victor H. Yngve, professor of linguistics At MIT, whose 1961 Paper, “Random Generation of English Sentences,” features Computational Poetry generated with the help Of COMIT, his string-processing language, And the words found in a children’s book about A tiny steam engine. Ask Bill Chamberlain And Thomas Etter,...
What makes a book a classic? Italo Calvino once suggested that the answer is ultimately a matter of personal choice. As he wrote in a 1986 essay for The New York Review of Books, “It is only by reading without bias that you might possibly come across the book that becomes your book” — one that you read and reread, always getting something from doing so. This is a nice...
I laughed at the phrase you used, Emptied yourself. I thought, It’s true, there’s nothing left. I didn’t remember how many drinks I’d had as I poured another. Who cares, I whispered to myself, thinking on our day together, how glad I was it was over — earlier, four men walking toward the border were vaporized by a drone that hovered haltingly like a buzzing bumblebee before the stigma of...