A Review of Mark Wunderlich’s GOD OF NOTHINGNESS
The experience of reading Mark Wunderlich’s fourth poetry book, God of Nothingness, mirrors the page-turning necessity and immediacy of a can’t-put-it-down novel: We must learn what happens next.
The Social Virtues Series
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Apostate
Through a shop window, I watch a man / strip a mannequin / down to her fiberglass shell.
A Review of Dana Roeser’s All Transparent Things Need Thundershirts
Dana Roeser’s All Transparent Things Need Thundershirts is a book of long, narrow poems that move lightly and deftly from one strand of experience to another, in the hope that such leaps will reveal a single underlying pattern of experience. This hope is fulfilled poem after poem, with the work never feeling overdetermined.
Listener
A balding man entering a tavern, nothing unusual, but a bump on top of his left ear caught my attention, reminding me of Forge. Could it have been my enigmatic classmate from decades ago?
Miranda
When Miranda walks in late with her red hair dripping, Miles doesn’t turn. He stays at the window watching a damp delivery man carry cases of Bud Light to the 7-Eleven across the street. “Hi,” Miranda says. Miles doesn’t tell her that she’s late. He doesn’t move to...
Storage
Margo went to Florida with Ted soon after she met him. The beach, Ted promised, and they left the frozen northeast in a minivan owned by the Tupperware company.
A Review of A Kind of Compass: Stories on Distance
Juxtaposition performs a sleight of hand. Presented with a collection of stories I might find the arrangement conducive to comparing them or I might not, but the possibility of not seeing the stories in relation to one another at all has been precluded.
Suffer the Shriveled of Spirit to Curse at You
Does not the world—that fat lout—/
stomp on their corns, hard?/
Fish Story
As Simon Peter and his brother Andrew toss their nets early in the Gospel of Matthew, Jesus appears and says that if they follow him, he will make them “fishers of men.” That they immediately forsake their work and go with him is usually seen as proof of their faith, but I have my doubts…
Christine
She was a tall, bony girl with long dark hair, bright green eyes and a thick, wide nose bent so firmly over her upper lip that the flesh seemed to have melted together. Boys on the playground pressed their noses flat against their faces and honked her name. Other...
After the Bomb Drill, Miss Hartung Teaches Weather
You think the weather is predictable? /
All this year where the worst is minus ten
The Forest
Vilnius was the last place she wanted to be. She distrusted its beautiful streets winding past courtyards full of cars and cats and huddled ghosts