Shots Fired
“The dead are having a party without us. They’ve left our worries behind . . .” —Kathleen Aguero, from “Send Off” Kerry was using again the last…
Freddy’s Vacation
I Excursion, corrects my father, who is a hunter. He is standing over a basin in our shack, pressing freshly butchered venison into salt, and the finger he…
The Anthropologist Problem
In the official texts that the villagers had permitted me to read, there was never a strict age requirement. What mattered was that the candidates were elders—re-tellers of stories,…
Shared Solitudes: The Mother House by Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin and Still Life by Ciaran Carson
The Mother House by Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin (Wake Forest University Press, 2020). Still Life by Ciaran Carson (Wake Forest University Press, 2020). Since the Covid-19 pandemic has fundamentally…
Kontemporary Amerikan Love Song: Kontemporary Amerikan Poetry: Poems by John Murillo
Kontemporary Amerikan Poetry: Poems by John Murillo (Four-Way Books, 2020). Kontemporary Amerikan Poetry: Poems, John Murillo’s second collection, is constructed in the vein of a craft-book, and nearly…
The Haunting Absence of Wayétu Moore: The Dragons, the Giant, the Women: A Memoir by Wayétu Moore
The Dragons, the Giant, the Women: A Memoir by Wayétu Moore (Graywolf Press, 2020). The pages of the immensely talented Wayétu Moore’s memoir The Dragons, the Giant, the…
We’ll Play to an Empty Room, Eli Tells Us
Ten till showtime this old friend of yours takes us backstage to meet the band and strum a few verses, hoping to stall till a crowd shows up, and…
Birds Again
in memory of my student, 2000-2019 After last spring’s surprise grackle attack and the autumn squirrels’ burgling acrobatics I almost didn’t fill the feeders this year. …
Smokestack
Sometimes I think the gods want something else. Enough with the libations, they might cry (if it weren’t for the prohibition on two-way speech). Don’t gore that ox on…