“We made a splendid cavalcade in our limousines, honking our ring-tone horns at stray passersby and especially at each other. At the war monument we lay red carnations in memory of our nation’s fallen heroes, though Yura and Sveta, who spoke of Pushkin like a friend, went a step further and brought a poem in a frame.
The first Katya and Sasha embraced atop the BT-7, while Andrei and Stasya took the less flammable T-34.”
“the traveler runs slick
along the horse, helps the mainsheet
stay trim, which means full, which
means movement, the line locked
in the jaws of the cleat, and the cant
of the boat reminds you of a particular
man you knew as a child. . . .”
“In the early summer of 1970, some ten years before she died, the famous writer tripped over a pink cat, fell down the stairs, and broke her hip so badly that when she was released from the hospital she had to spend some months in a nursing home out in the Maryland suburbs.”
“H. L. Hix: Your question suggests one aspect of the project for me: a change from passive to active. Maybe I would sit and wait for inspiration if I thought I were a divine emissary or the darling of the muses, but all evidence points to the contrary, so I think of poetry in fairly blue-collar terms. Part of what the obsession implies is that I ‘keep at it.’ Poetry feels to me much more like old-fashioned hard work than it does like a visitation from above. There’s plenty of ambient material, but like soil it needs to be worked if it’s going to produce what you want it to produce, or at least that’s been my experience.”
“In a clearing between two birches
were our broken pots and mildewed clothes
and I wept for the things grown old without me.”
“One winter’s snows.
Two loves I could not welcome.
A year of mostly silence.”
“Your dreams hold your days together.
You spend your time transforming stars into
kitchen implements that you could bake potatoes in.”
A review of Lisa Olstein’s Lost Alphabet, by Lynne Potts
“Imagine that you have entered a universe of moths—say, a faraway place where day after day, season after season you study the movement, habits, life and death cycles of moths. If you can imagine doing so, you will have entered the world of Lisa Olstein’s Lost Alphabet. You will be in a strange place where you can’t quite get your geographic bearings—and you will be consumed by the essence of moth-ness.”
“Now that the documentation of your life is notarized,
Birth & Death certificates time-stamped,
Now that your most recent draft is abandoned,
The primitive ’60s swallow tattoo on your left forearm will transform
Into a hummingbird, thumbnail-size, so as not to be overstated. . . .”
“And then, as if that wasn’t bad enough, the Polish president’s plane went down, killing everyone on board including the president and several high-ranking members of the government. In the wake of the many tragic aspects of this crash . . . I got to thinking about something I’m always thinking about although I sometimes wish I wasn’t: chain reactions, train of thought, stream of consciousness, karma. The maddening, the obsessive, the endlessly entertaining connectivity of things and what that has to do with telling stories.”
“My father came to me in a dream
to walk with me around a stadium.
Not wearing the jaunty motley of his last months:
the patchwork newsboy cap and paneled shirt
he wore when tearing around town,
smoke streaming from the car window.”
Congratulations to AGNI poet Tomas Tranströmer, winner of the 2011 Nobel Prize in Literature!
“It was a funeral
and I felt the dead man
reading my thoughts
better than I could.”
A review of Bragi Ólafsson’s The Ambassador by Erin Gilbert
“When we read as consumers we are consuming a product; but reading a novel like The Ambassador requires us to look at literature the way my father looks at ferries—to see an ingeniously designed, carefully constructed assemblage of parts, an assemblage that is good and valuable because it functions so well.”
“In [Williams’s novella], he has a created a character mostly us, a man who is little more than a pastiche of voices, searching and failing to find an authentic self. Phong Nguyen’s debut story collection, Memory Sickness, also deals with race and identity. But here identity, once firmly intact for these characters, is jarred loose and set adrift, often by memory and their relationship to Rhode Island, the tiniest of states and home to some of the country’s biggest oddballs.”
“Brian Gresko: Do you have models in mind when you begin a project? By models I mean works that influence your writing.
Jonathan Lethem: . . . I’ve come to believe that there is something innate in my method, my sentences, and my approach to narrative and characters that’s inalterable, and that transforms these influences even when I’m not conscious of it. So I don’t ever think in terms of embarrassment or hesitation or reservations about being influenced or working with models.”
“Sharp chop
Of your uncle’s cough clocks the hours; your sister’s
Washing, the rush of your thoughts. Morning is nine
Glass bangles hoisting sacks of sugar
From the floor. I’m not talking
About a place, but a country. . . .”
“O never was there vestal more demure
than ardent, pleasing she who urges
carnal lures with such schemed subtlety
to keep a peek discreet. . . .”
Krasnoyarsk
