Everything

So this morning I wake up, give my daughter a long bottle of formula (she is now able to wield the bottle on her own) and await my wife’s return from Dunkin Donuts. Yes. My wife has gone out to hunt. I am reading Across The Land And Water (Selected Poems, 1964-2001) of W.G.Sebald, Author [...]

The two women in the adjacent garden, draped with thick woolens, braids hanging down from both sides of the skull, hitched together with a string between their shoulder blades. They pause their spade, their hoe, or their small hand trowel and admire a mating pair of Hoopoe birds, audaciously mohawked with tangerine and flashing zebra [...]

I have done physical labor in my life, and never found it harsh or unrewarding except when it was under the scrutiny of a manager (foremen, overseer, take your pick). They’re job was to make sure I was “doing it the right way,” or that I was doing it quickly, or that I was doing [...]

In Caroline Knox’s nimble new collection Flemish, a poem entitled simply “They” begins: “They live in a mobile home/made of Adobe Caslon.” The elided antecedent here could very well be Knox’s poems; while maintaining a healthy awareness of themselves as constructed objects (“black and white graphic art,” Knox has called them), they simultaneously feel in [...]

ONE Delhi is hell. It is hot. It hits one in the face like the exhaust pipe of a long-haul trailer spewing thick blackness into a pristine sky. It smells like ruin. The impression is delayed, of course, as the city puts one its best feet forward at first. The sparkling, new T3 at Indira [...]

There never were any hipsters in Elizabeth. Elizabeth is like the hell of hipsters. All the Brownstones were torn down and replaced by McDonalds. The DeCalvacante family had its headquarters there. The bars are old school, and too truly old school to be retro. Worst of all, the people are sincere and earnest and work [...]

Conscientious Protests –after Julio Cortazar What a conscientious protest: marketing One A Day vitamins to death-row inmates, performing a little Crip Walk when security wands the standing body like a barcode, listening to the bald deputy bad-mouth his own root canal that hasn’t happened yet. What a conscientious protest: naming each bandoleer bullet after the [...]