do not worry about the bruised dreams
of the night-cafe.
place them into glass jars.
look to the coal weeds, the crushed chestnuts,
the shapes gorged with distances.
what you thought for hands: sheafs of lavender.
the seashells turning into roses.
THE WHOLE DAMN LOVELY THING
by Melissa Goode
Hannah made a cherry pie and it relaxed her. Only when she was carrying the pie from her house to the neighbor’s, still warm in its tin, did she think it might be inappropriate for a barbecue. She should have brought a six-pack of beer, or some cheese and crackers, because a barbecue probably did not even make it to dessert. In any case, it was too late. Amy had come to her front door to let in a couple of people and spotted Hannah walking up the drive.
Hannah felt overdressed too. She was. She always was, now wearing a white sundress with pumps—Amy wore jeans and flip-flops.
“Oh, you weren’t supposed to bring anything,” Amy said, dragging her into a one armed hug, her other hand holding a glass of wine.
Hannah wanted to turn around and throw the pie in the trash, but Amy was pulling back the dish towel covering.
“Wow! Did you make that?”
“Yes. I did,” Hannah said, quietly.
The slick silver thread of highway
pulls taut over the Keystone State.
Nothing is as I imagined it,
says Mother to the oil field
churning with the polished quiet
of cash for longer than a mile,
eyes greener in the copper
industrial light. It is 1999.
My father has built a wall
inside her, rust on roses,
a wheel’s fever. The child
kicks like a miniature Samson,
swims the darkening length.
Torcida
Se me puso ella fractal esta mañana, fractal, la cara toda triángulos & rombos & retorcida que se rompía. Pero ya que los mansos vamos a heredar la tierra quemada, esquivé sus reproches, grandes e infinitos como trenes carboneros…y yo, imbécil de mí, voy y me monto en uno, a lo errabundo, por discutir, porque son tan jodidamente largos y lentos, y me muero alto y claro en dos segundos. Ya incluso la cocina se sentía diferente, más lenta, como si estuviera bajo el agua. Y entonces miro al reloj y son las seis. La tía Rosa solía decir que una pareja es igualita que las dos manecillas de un reloj: por siempre separándose y rejuntándose otra vez, así que al mediodía hay amor lleno y a las seis, que es como una espada, sólo queda el odio.
No one really expected the world to end like this. For one thing, it took too damn long. People want bad things to happen like a pulled-off Band-Aid rather than the slow pushing of a knife. Instead, this is how it happened: gravity just plum up and left. Everything not tied down or deeply rooted floated away. Cars, umbrellas, little squirrels, everything. Big lakes seemed to erupt like geysers and their poor fish flapped and flailed in the atmosphere growing thinner and thinner and waited, with increasingly cloudy brains, for the splash that never came. People held their beloved family pets on leashes like balloons and children cupped their goldfish in upside down hands until they could figure out how to refill empty bowls. Some people seemed relieved, though, to no longer be burdened with the daily decision to live or not. They just let go and that was that. Others held on white-knuckle tight, pulling and floating their way into hardware stores for ropes and chains and bungees to tie themselves down with. Some people seemed to have been expecting something like this.
i.
From a beach towel radio, a Bee Gees' song
resonates along the shore, its echoes pressing
on the margins of the summer that contains it,
and a single season swells to half a lifetime.
thanks for putting up
with my meat cleaver tendencies - hooligan saviour
better pray for your kin, where the black cake soil
of lament frosting has taken you.
you will fall from this chair
brown belt darkened
backseat-leather-cracked
what shall happen
instead?
It is rarely what we imagine or expect, but always something burrowing beyond sight, hidden in the crevices or dreaming itself from the flurried wings of crows, my mother in the backyard setting down the tin plates of meat scraps or peanuts, the birds a frenzy of commotion. And here, beside us, is cousin Whitney, twelve that summer while my brother and I are eight and nine, and everything about her is simply wrong. Slow and stuttering speech. A staccato way of walking. Fingers touching even simple words she can barely read.
Canned laughter sounded from the television, but no one was smiling in the kitchen where I faced my mother, our dog's metal chain cold against my palm. She was close to six feet tall, and I was only eight, but I narrowed my eyes and glared at her. "I can hit you," I said. "I can kick you all I want."
She looked at me, her green irises bisected by the deep lines etched in the bifocal lens she wore. "Go ahead," she said.
I whipped the chain forward as I sprung up in my shiny Mary Jane shoes. It was a clumsy attempt; I barely grazed her shoulder. I swung again. And again, stopping only when the chain connected with my mother's glasses. I didn't break them, but they hung askew on her shocked face.
a hall three fourths full of echo (generally, many wrung bells)
a denture amid other fruits of maya; several identities
the word ‘tender,’ bled out, kept
quiet—other such by products
a flyover while you are in the bathroom (laughing alone)
howl of heaven when I
nothing ventured; some whens, whenevers
a tiny line of light through minor chords
a vagina flown through with ghosts—
It is, it is, it is – it’s you, cool as the night, scraping toothy wing on
wing. Yeah, man. Your it is is far from my it was, in this town
I never knew I’d know. Yo, first violinist of Washington Square,
slave picnic site, burial ground a shout from Independence Hall.
It is, it is – it is fall, it is here, it is you and I and your
A brother is a cistern and a bucket with a rope. The care with which
the rope is tied is not the same as knitting, but knitting is also a kind
of love. There are many, many boots. Years of knowing and
not-knowing but at least being present result in some impenetrable
surface. Waves on waves, water in the tank. During winters, we all
knock the pipes, which is to say, we suffer. Which is to say, we're
human. Which is to say, we have each other in a contract of always.
LIGHT POLLUTION
Somewhere, cloud missives,
buckshot echoes devouring a hillside
in knock-kneed devotion. Elder rain
a voice, which tells each of us: ache,
fill vast jars with the pulp of it, and
seal them with whatever tools you find. We tried
The man across the desk was handsome in the way that young men could be without actually being attractive. That was one of the things Melissa had started to appreciate when she passed fifty; she could recognize the beauty of younger men without desiring them. So yes, the man was handsome. But tired-looking; he needed to shave. He leaned forward across the desk and smiled weakly at her.
We should take a shot
of cognac, a walk. Some
days I believe desire
is its own penance. Some
days, I know if I would have
done that, it would have come
I will tell you the first part of this story backwards, because that’s how I remember it. Starting with the fight. The chocolate is always an after-thought.
He was standing in front of the apartment door when I got home with groceries. My fiancé Francis was not yet home from work. The door to our apartment in Switzerland was at the end of a narrow hallway. Two could barely pass. Francis had said not to let his brother in when he wasn’t there. Francis had left the number to call the institution to come get him. His brother wasn’t supposed to get out, but every couple weeks he did. Francis had said his brother had killed their mother, but then he took it back. It was probably really the cancer. He repeated, probably. He’d left his brother alone with their mother and he’d pushed her, breaking her ribs. She never left the hospital. Francis’ brother was standing at the end of the very narrow hallway when I got home.
For a butter knife it was sharp. My grandmother must have had it for a long time. Its blade was truncated by a fracture, rust collecting at the end of its one-inch length, at the site of the break. I was never sure if she kept it because of some sentimental attachment or a deep-seated sense of Soviet scarcity made more acute by the still fresh memories of the deprivations of the Great War, which was only two decades behind her. I was attached to my distorted reflection looking back at me from its heavy silver handle.
THE RIVER RISING
by Robert Heald
The air is glass. Leave the window open wide,
and I’ll tell you how the daylight is its own
kind of prayer. I’ll tell you the secrets
you mutter in sleep. You dream of rain,
and morning is breaking. You dream
of my hands, and your river heart is rising.
The brown water at my ankles, my knees,
my groin. The green waters at my chest
dragging me under. My bones on the riverbed,
By the ninth year we believed it might never end and gave up trying to win it because trying to win a war is the surest way to make it go on; that is, when you try to win a war it’s only the war that wins. This was the sum of the wisdom we had achieved in nearly a decade; in fact, it was the solitary thing we had achieved in all those years of fighting and suffering. Now that we were pushing thirty we couldn’t bear that the war would go on and on, not just for another decade but for the rest of our lives. Nevertheless, simply laying down our arms and surrendering would be futile because of the swarms of gung-ho seventeen- and eighteen-year-olds, weaned on tales of glory and revenge, who wouldn't think of giving up, at least not for another nine more years. As for ourselves, our generation, we reckoned that it wasn’t the enemy that needed to be defeated but the war itself. It had already ruined everything it touched, from dairy farms to post-adolescence, from stone bridges to summer romances, from highway overpasses to bedside manners, from the pride of old men to the breasts of pubescent girls. So, by and by, we came up with a plan, desperate yet not inelegant. A dozen of us decided to organize a theater festival, as we announced, right on the front lines (of which there really weren't any), right in the middle of the battlefield (though there really was no field). Our great production would stretch from the trenches to the rear echelons,
*
There is skin even the sky
seeps through –both arms
weighted down though you
are flying through dirt
and under this faucet
hear it clouding over
A Canadian in Paris who must always remind her French friends that she is not American. A young widow who remarries a Frenchman, whom she later divorces. A twenty-seven-year-old who is “about like [she] always [was], to tell . . . the truth. Reading instead of listening.” This is Shirley Perrigny, formerly Higgins (nee Norrington), and the protagonist of Mavis Gallant’s 1970 novel A Fairly Good Time. Gallant, just like Shirley, was a Canadian who made Paris her home. Perhaps known best for her acclaimed short stories, Gallant wrote two novels, A Fairly Good Time and Green Water, Green Sky. These two novels were re-published by the New York Review of Books in 2016, just two years since Gallant’s death at age 91.
Volker Weidermann’s Ostend gives us the stories of writers Joseph Roth and Stefan Zweig, along with an ensemble of friends, coming for summer holiday to a favorite Belgian beach resort. The style is clipped and brief. History, dark fairy tale, friendship, fleeting joy, literary enchantment, dissipation, destruction, exile. Ostend reads as a time capsule that Weidermann has sorted through for us, and organized. It’s 1936, and the holiday begins like a David Hockney print, with an inviting surface of sea and sun and wide blue sky. But as we make our way through Weidermann’s collections of scenes from the period, the view looks more like something painted by James Ensor, the mask making, shell collecting, piano playing older artist who happens to live in a little house in Ostend. As we look behind the scenes at the act of literary creation we see the writer as an element of a complex artistic ecosystem. Ostend pushes us to think about the serious, long work necessary to heal an artistic ecosystem when racism has had a place inside it.
Breakfast with Neruda is a true journey of the self, taking us deeper with every turn of the page. It shows us that healing can only take place once we dismantle the walls we painstakingly build around ourselves and that our most vulnerable selves might hide our strongest truths.
Dear June,
I work in the billing department of an automobile dealership in the upper Midwest. One of my colleagues, a man I'll call Ernie, constantly refers to me as "Cupcake," something which I think is demeaning and degrading to me, especially since I just got my CPA. I told Ernie a couple of times to knock it off, but all he ever says is, "Lighten up, kid."
Ernie is old enough to be my grandfather, and I suppose I have to be tolerant of the behavior of a different generation. The guy is—let's face it—an uncouth slob. I can't tell you how much it sickens me to watch him licking the peanut butter off his knife as he makes his lunch every day. To top it off, he burps after every bite.
It’s easy to forget, in the middle of reading a stanza or a paragraph or a recipe for sauerkraut, that language is something constantly occupied with its author’s intention and its reader’s reception — it is not still nor discreet nor impersonal, no matter how inhumane the result may taste. Lucia Chericiu’s poetry collection Edible Flowers, through its personal and intimate depictions of history, home, fruit, bodies, and language, communicates how language is constantly in translation, moving between nerve-endings and letters, and irrevocably infused with the humanity that authored it and the humanity that receives it.
Daniel Saldaña París’s Among Strange Victims, translated by Christina MacSweeney, immediately pulls the reader into its universe. It does so with such thorough and seamless skill that the reader becomes a victim of this strange, off-kilter world. While it’s initially easy to get lost trying to find the meaning, or premise in general, of the series of peculiar events that passes throughout the novel, the ride is worth the suspension of belief. What starts with a proposal in the form of a note, at first presumably left by a snarky, administrative coworker, becomes the catalyst in the marriage of Rodrigo and Cecilia, and the kickstarter for the novel’s bizarre happenings, wherein a group of lonely and bored people seek answers for the inexplicable in the everyday.
There is Sylvia Plath’s Ariel. There is Ted Hughes’ Animal Poems. And then there is Tongue Screw. May we justly call it confessional? Not without complications. What gave Plath and Hughes, that broken set of matching china, their staying power is not the impulse to tell all, but the containment of raw human experience within a careful structure of implacable imagery. Whether they influenced her, or whether she found her independent way through a haunted yet familiar landscape, Heather Derr-Smith uses the wound of image in each of her indelible poems.
Dear June, My husband and I have been together for ten years and married for six of them. We have a four-year-old daughter who is the center of our lives. Everything seemed fine. Sex seemed especially fine. But now he…
The Deathmask of El Gaucho functions cohesively for not only El Gaucho’s recurring appearances across the eight stories that shape the novella, but for the overriding themes introduced in this key story. Identity and the temporary nature of all things are at the heart of Mancilla’s work, and his fast-moving prose, suffused with wrestling lingo, such as suplexes and figure-four leg locks, bring the concepts to life in compulsively literary and subversive ways. El Gaucho is consumed with and by the identity he projects to the world. Mancilla uses Levesque and The Mask as a push-pull in the search for the wrestler’s true identity.
Dear June,
I have a second interview coming up for a job I want very much. I have been going over questions they are likely to ask me. I feel pretty comfortable talking about my experience and qualifications, but I also anticipate a question like: What would you say, or what would your employer say about you—positive and negative?
The part of the question that I'm struggling with is the "negative." How do I talk about my "areas for growth?"
—Troubled in Tampa
When I sat down to read Beth Kephart’s newest novel, This Is the Story of You, its title and cover art caught my attention—personal, serene, then chaotic. I read the first line of chapter one—Blue, for example—and fell in love with the writing. A quarter of the way through the book, I adored each character, and connected with Mira, the narrator and protagonist. Kephart’s mesmerizing writing, wonderful characters, and themes of strength and endurance thrilled me from beginning to end.
Daniel Sada’s One Out of Two is beautiful and bizarre. The novel, translated by the prolific Spanish-to-English translator, Katherine Silver, follows the Gamal sisters, furiously hard-working and identical middle-aged twins who work as seamstresses in the small town of Ocampo, Mexico. A sign hanging in their shop reads: “WE ARE BUSY PROFESSIONALS. RESTRICT YOUR CONVERSATION TO THE BUSINESS AT HAND. PLEASE DO NOT DISTURB US FOR NO REASON. SINCERELY: THE GAMAL SISTERS.” These women have no patience for the dilly-dallying or the gossip of their fellow townspeople. Instead, they are content—at least initially—to focus almost entirely on their work, “without so much as a twinge of longing, confident that their daily and incessant toil will yield wonders, that good fortune is bound to result from great effort…”
Dear June,
To be honest, I feel stuck. I realized that I've been writing, studying, and publishing fiction for a decade, but I can't seem to take the next step.
My short stories show up in the pretty-good literary magazines. I've had some near misses but haven't cracked into the first tier yet. Even though I've got several completed manuscripts, I can't seem to find an agent and I despair of ever seeing my name on a published novel. It's discouraging, and I wonder if I'm doing something wrong?
Though João Gilberto Noll has published nearly twenty books, Quiet Creature on the Corner is his first to be translated into English (by the talented Dr. Adam Morris). A five-time recipient of Brazil’s prestigious Prêmio Jabuti, Noll lives in Porto Alegre, which also happens to be the hometown of Quiet Creature’s narrator—an unemployed poet who finds himself in jail for raping his young neighbor, Mariana. But then, in a bizarre sequence of events, the poet is soon removed from jail and carted to the Almanova Clinic before then being moved yet again, this time to the mysterious household of Kurt, a German Brazilian, for whom the classic laws of life—time, money, aging, purpose, etc.—no longer seem to apply.
Proust creates a time and place that is both familiar and palpable. Saer does nothing of the sort: a fictional village with a dramatized horizon overcast with pervasive isolation. And yet, it’s an equally genuine exploration of the difficulties of talking about the past, “where no one ever goes” (an obviously ironic claim for a memoir). “The past is a foreign country,” in the famous opening sentence of L. P. Hartley’s The Go-Betweens, “they do things differently there.” The Clouds, beautifully, warns us there might not be a “there” to turn back to at all. For Saer, who stayed in Paris until his death, this certainly was the case.
Viola Di Grado, an exciting new Italian literary voice, begins her novel Hollow Heart with this sentence: In 2011, the world ended: I killed myself.
In fact, the book is narrated by a dead woman, Dorotea, who describes exactly how she killed herself and why (she drowned herself in the bathtub after a romantic breakup). Then Dorotea, a grad student living in Catania, Sicily, draws the reader into life after life with a dark, daring approach that attests to Di Grado’s penchant for innovation and invention.
Dear June,
One of my coworkers, a middle-aged married man, regularly refers to his wife as an alcoholic in casual conversation. He uses the word as if it's a punch line in a joke, and for some reason, others tend to laugh. Sometimes, he elaborates by calling her a "mean drunk." I'm uncomfortable with this on so many levels, especially as individuals in my immediate family have struggled with alcoholism. I'm torn between telling him that I don't find addiction humorous and asking him, very genuinely, if everything is okay. I'm also angry for his wife and feel compelled to defend her privacy. Even worse, he keeps asking my partner and I on a double date! How do I handle this overshare?
—Uncomfortable in New England
There are (supposedly) only two types of narratives. The first is the story of a person going on a journey. The second, a kind of inverse of the first, is the story of a stranger who comes to town. Whether or not you subscribe to this idea of only two narrative types (I, personally, do not), the journey narrative is one of the oldest and most human stories in all of literature. And because “the journey” is such a familiar kind of story, those novels, stories, or memoirs that take that motif and spin it in new and interesting directions also dramatically reshape the parameters and expectations of literature.
The cover of Sarah Nichols’ latest chapbook is evocative. How do its images prepare us for what’s inside? We are presented with an oversized sun hat and mirror. At first I thought the mirror was a magnifying glass. A beginning note informs us that the text is sourced from Grey Gardens, the documentary directed by Albert and David Maysles. The 1976 cult film profiles Edith “Big Edie” Bouvier Beale and Edith “Little Edie” Beale, two eccentric former socialites who are noted for being Jackie Onassis’ aunt and cousin, respectively. Together they live in relative isolation amongst raccoons, cats, and fleas at Grey Gardens, their dilapidated 28-room estate in East Hampton, NY. Over the years the women, particularly Little Edie, have become camp icons, remembered as precocious misfits shunned by (or shunning?) upper class morality and ethics. Despite their precarious living situations, the Edies make time for singing, for dancing, for costumes, for pontification, for recalling. Under their rule, Grey Gardens transforms into a space of performances and guises, a seemingly eternal stage.
Elliott Chaze's novel Black Wings Has My Angel explores a brilliant but fatal partnership between two criminals bent on committing the perfect heist. “Tim Sunblade”—not his real name—escapes prison with nothing but his wits and a foolproof plan for a high-end robbery. His first week back in civilian life, he hires Virginia, a “ten-dollar tramp” who is not only more than what he paid for, but more than he bargained for. “What I wanted was a big stupid commercial blob of a woman; not a slender poised thing with skin the color of pearls melted in honey.” It isn't exactly love at first sight, but Tim finds Virginia absolutely irresistible.
Don’t Think, Burgin’s newest collection of short stories (and his nineteenth book), is one of his very best. The author’s straightforward and suspense-driven storytelling voice is as compelling as ever, the stories somewhat spooky and darkly comic. They give you the willies and keep you coming back for more. But Burgin, in this latest collection, demonstrates a new empathy for his characters. This notable evolution gives the characters softer landings and a fuller resonance in the reader’s imagination.
Dear June,
My wife and I have a three-year-old and a new baby. My parents, especially Dad, are very religious, but my wife and I are not at all observant. When our older son was about the age our baby is now, Dad and Mom offered to watch him one Sunday morning and acted somewhat tense and evasive when we came to pick him up. One of their neighbors eventually let slip that my folks had taken him off and had him christened that day. We confronted my parents—although we were mostly good-natured about it, so it wasn’t a confrontation in that sense. But we did insist that they not involve our son in any religious events or rituals without our consent, and they promised.
Lucas Knight and his father come to Puerto Rico every summer from Houston, Texas. Lucas’s father transforms abandoned, historical buildings into extravagant resorts, while Lucas is content to find trouble with his friends—at least until he’s old enough to take over his father’s business.
In her collection Voiceless Love, Katherine Brueck takes to heart her idol Wroth’s enjoinder, finding a personal path to “abusing the sight” with dexterous sleights. Her preface lays out nakedly the autobiographical aims of the book, as something of a manual of solace, rooted in her contemplation of a stark and painful family life, softened somewhat by marriage, an adopted child, and God. There is a pilgrim’s progress explicit in the structure of the book as it moves from friends and lovers through spouse and child and finally to God the crucified. Yet in this age of over-explaining in all literary genres, and gratuitous self-revelation masquerading as confession, Brueck constantly reminds us of the virtues of decorum and the tactical advantages of careful prosody.
The magic of discovery presses against the melancholy of the ruins. We are like a pair of naturalists who’ve discovered a lost link in the evolutionary chain, a last survivor of a species thought extinct. Evolutionary biologist Edward O. Wilson, in his new book, Half-Earth, calls this the “Lord God moment.” We find a wooden trunk with “A.H. Whetstone” and her address thick-inked by a nineteenth century hand, a plastic portable church organ keyboard in the springhouse, a carpet of rust growing on a Zenith turntable tangled in the weeds outside. Water rushes through the handsome stone channel of the spring. The farmers must have dammed the creek to build the channel. When it was finished, they let the water loose, yet no longer wild. Now, it escapes unseen into the valley.
Written by Josh Baylock, drawn by Hoyt Silva, and produced by David H. Krikorian, Operation Nemesis is the story of the early 20th century Armenian genocide and the tale of the eventual murder of that genocide’s architect. While this is a tale of Turkey’s then leader and dictator Talaat Pasha’s annihilation of over one million Armenians during World War I, the story of that atrocity unfolds through the trial and eventual acquittal of the assassin, Soghomon Tehlirsan. Historically rich, this graphic novel reads like a storyboard to a cinematic rendering of this tragic narrative. Each panel is vivid in its noir presentation: dark but flush with rich tones, stark and at times brutal, but firmly recounting an important story.
Dear June,
I recently attended an amateur theatrical production that featured a coworker. During the play, I realized that my coworker is "acting" in the office, as much as she was on the stage. Now I'm wondering whether to continue to be my authentic self or sign up for acting classes. What do you think?
— Deceived in Delaware County
Bestiality, child abuse, love, depression, heartbreak: these are among the many subjects brought to life in Naja Marie Aidt’s story collection, Baboon. Aidt, born in Greenland, a resident of Brooklyn, writes in the intersection, the most dangerous part of the street. Her stories stand boldly in the overlap of the ordinary and the absurd, between the wondrous and the vile. Brave and masterful, it’s no wonder Aidt has won both the Pen Literary Award and the Nordic Council Literature Prize.
In one devastating visual from the 2011 British television miniseries The Promise, a veteran of the Israeli armed forces shows the unaware protagonist the tragedy of the border between Israel and Palestine. As the series progresses—switching between the present time and that time which the protagonist’s grandfather spent in Post-WWII Israel as a British peacekeeper—the pathos of this divide becomes mired in historical and social realities beyond obvious resolution. This quagmire of a divided land is a familiar theme for our time. Ukrainian physicist-cum-entrepreneur-cum-author Alexei Nikitin’s novel YT specifically reminds us of the case of his country, whose Maidan revolution in 2014 tried to answer encroaching Russian imperialism. Nikitin’s novel is set both in 1984’s Soviet-dominated Kiev and the democratic Kiev of 2004, its miasma of paranoia accompanying everything Soviet and everything political markedly similar to the Israel-Palestine of The Promise. In everything, a line.
Patience demands to be read twice: first, as a who-done-it, and second, as a who-are-you. On the surface, Daniel Clowes has written a murder mystery. When newlywed Jack Barlow finds his pregnant wife, Patience, dead in their apartment, he begins an obsessive hunt to identify her killer. He hires a private investigator. He time travels into her past, attempting to understand who could enact such violence. He begins a journey into the wide expanse of what he never knew about his wife—a terrain that expands for years. This is a story about meeting the person you love much later than you’ve started to love them, and that is the energy that propels the reader forward—hunting for Patience’s killer, yes, but digging for something much deeper.