Nine Winds (i am only ever writing about love)
I. Pandemic IT IS THE FIRST WEEK OF MARCH WHEN WE CROSS THE BORDER INTO MEXICO, continuing the long drive from the temperate rainforest of the Pacific Northwest and head down the California coast, where the land is roughened into arid boulders. We are now cruising the...
The Social Virtues Series
Recent Posts
Ten Days in March (This Different Life)
The sea is roped off by yellow caution tape and orange barricades, the colors reminding me of jellyfish that sometimes wash up to the shore, that I sometimes mistake for toys.
A Review of AS ONE FIRE CONSUMES ANOTHER by John Sibley Williams
It is 2020 and it seems that we all feel immersed in destruction. Destruction surrounds us and we struggle to understand our own complicity in it. This was true when John Sibley Willams’ book, As One Fire Consumes Another was released in April 2019, and seems to have become an even more pressing reality in the year since.
Three Poems: Dear Human
When I was about to die
I went hunting for
pinecones
with that generic plastic bag
with the smiling face:
Thanks for
Shopping Here!
Two Poems
Leave that Tiffany bling. It’s a pile of cold cash. / Facile, faceted carbon copies.
Does Yours Have a Heart, Too?
Once there was a person who was tasked with reducing a mountain into a flat plain. For a shopping mall. For a housing development. For a prairie. For the gemstones within. They moved their family to a new home at the base of the mountain, which was tall enough to keep...
Some Words About Proverbs
I’ve played my part as tourist in the Netherlands. In Amsterdam, I skipped out of the way of ring-chiming bicycles. I drank Amstel beer under an awning while an afternoon rain dotted the surface water of the Singel canal.
Review of WHERE WE GO WHEN ALL WE WERE IS GONE by Sequoia Nagamatsu
Where We Go When All We Were Is Gone is haunting literary work, and I mean that literally: ghosts populate the book. The collection is set in modern Japan, where the dead, the undead, and countless characters from Japanese pop culture and cultural myth struggle to exist, and coexist, at the edges of the human world.
At Her Mirror
She slips out of her dress, turns
this way and that, cursing her breasts,
Willy Loman’s Reckless Daughter
Editor-in-Chief, powerhouse poet, and all around love, Elizabeth Powell’s newest book Willy Loman’s Reckless Daughter gets a nice mention in The New Yorker!
Congratulations!
Congratulations to GMR contributors Michael Bazzett, Hadara Bar-Nadav, and Melissa Stein!
Review of POOR YOUR SOUL by Mira Ptacin
Despite changes that reproductive medicine has wrought over the last half century, the childbearing narrative still unfolds along familiar lines. Conception, pregnancy, and delivery offer a beginning, middle—and an end that is a new beginning. Naturally divided into months, the drama typically ends with a new baby whose adorable qualities will outweigh its constant demands for center stage. But the scenes in Mira Ptacin’s recent memoir do not nest as prettily as Russian dolls.