from The Body Papers

Memoir
  One morning in the spring when I was seven years old, I woke up a puffy pink monster. My lips had disappeared into a mass of swollen flesh, my…

The Blue, an excerpt from Salvage: A Memoir

Memoir
  On the high shelves of my father’s salvage store in Provincetown, I sometimes spotted a glimmer of blue among his dusty collections of clam rakes, lanterns, chains, and anchors;…

My Father’s Teeth

Memoir
  My father saved his teeth by lying through them. Somewhere on the border between Russia and Poland, pines and rifles, in the nineteen-teens, he went off to the woods…

The Sharp White Background

Reviews
Citizen: An American Lyric by Claudia Rankine (Graywolf Press, 2014); Forgiveness Forgiveness by Shane McCrae (Factory Hollow Press, 2014).   Claudia Rankine and Shane McCrae are both writers who directly,…

Vanishings and Returns

Reviews
  Second Childhood: Poems by Fanny Howe (Graywolf Press, 2014); Our Vanishing by Frannie Lindsay (Red Hen Press, 2014).   New books by Fanny Howe and Frannie Lindsay explore facets…

Humping the Bush

Fiction
  There is a photograph of our father in an olive drab T-shirt and jungle fatigues, his still-plentiful hair clipped close to his head. He’s crouched on a bald knob…

La Vita è Bella

poetry
  I know what happens in the end. I’ve seen the movie many times. The young son makes it. The father, he dies   strutting cheerfully for his son in…

Fire in the Hole

poetry
  Once I was air- borne, brief gust, thrown from the hot white metal of a car—   do I have to go? I asked the paramedic. He buckled me…

The Dogs

poetry
  The dogs began to bark. The dogs were almost always barking. Whenever someone would approach the house or just walk by, the dogs would bark. But C and S…