Latest Writing
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INTERVIEW WITH Matthew Olzmann
Matthew Olzmann’s latest collection, Constellation Route, is out now from Alice James. He has published two previous collections, Contradictions in the Design and Mezzanines, and he has received fellowships from Kundiman, the Kresge Arts Foundation and the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference. FWR: Can you speak on the genesis and organization of Constellation Route? MO:…
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INTERVIEW WITH Clifford Thompson
Clifford Thompson is the recipient of a Whiting Writers’ Award for nonfiction in 2013 for Love for Sale and Other Essays, published by Autumn House Press. He has also published a memoir (Twin of Blackness), a novel (Signifying Nothing) and a nonfiction book (What It Is: Race, Family, and One Thinking Black Man’s Blues). Thompson’s…
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Ghinwa Jawhari on her debut chapbook: BINT Interviewed by Sara Elkamel
Ghinwa Jawhari named her debut chapbook, selected by poet Aria Aber for publication by Radix Media, BINT, Arabic for girl. In Arab cultures, the word is also used to describe a virgin woman, of any age. In this series of poems, compact in form yet unbridled in lyricism, Jawhari explores the passage (particularly of those…
POETRY
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TWO POEMS by Corinna Rosendahl
from Scenes from the Seconds It was written for an exhibition that at the end of her life Louise Bourgeois circled back to her birth1 When I did as asked like long hair I pulled my fire back 1Unknown *** Henceforth and forever I am my own…
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PARIS by Elly Bookman
At seventeen I gazed a good ten minutes at Saint Catherine Labouré’s incorruptible palms around a rosary. Soon I’d learn to drive a manual transmission, the backward N of the ascending gears. The still-war had been on for more than a year, and there was something so similarly earned in her un-atrophied grip. I…
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FLEVATO by Richard Siken
We are going to poison the rats, announced the Transit Authority. They had posted fliers but no one was reading them. The subway was crowded. I was late and trying to think diagonally, up and around the corners. I wasn’t used to it. I grew up in a flat land where there was no descending.…
FICTION
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BLINDKEY POINT by Norris Eppes
Most Blindkey Point locals thought the help-line stickers were enough. Tilda disagreed. Without answers to the strange phenomenon, they built the Here For You Center. It was a building full of skylights. There were four round tables, varnished wood. The backs of the white chairs were curved like…
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HEARTWOOD by Rose Skelton
On the day after Hazel died – it was a Tuesday afternoon in early March – George stood at his woodworking bench, whittling a bowl. He pressed the piece of yew down, and used a bowl gouge to scoop a smooth sliver of the pinkish-white wood so that it curled upwards and away, falling…
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COLLAPSED by Michael Holladay
When I was at Andy’s house he looked at me and said, “I want to stone that place to the ground.” We were getting high on the basement couch, and he was behind a thin mist of smoke. He was talking about the tobacco warehouse his dad inherited, now dilapidated. Or, his dad called it…
TRANSLATION
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ANCIENT MOSQUE by Xiao Shui trans. Judith Huang
Slightly tipsy, walking out of Hongbin Tower. Two hearses appear on the bike lane. The invisible corpse, shut in a hand-pushed metal box covered with black brocade, jingles, bangs and clatters, squeezing through the onrush of head-spinning traffic. Tightly-packed pedestrians scatter loosely in the smog, all eyeing him, intent on helping him find an opening.…
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TWO POEMS by Ashraf Zaghal trans. Ghada Mourad (from ARABIC)
Halloween Scene 1Scarves flyAs if a tribe of ghosts carry them to the skyThey fly and land with sin on my neighbor’s headMy neighbor knows neither their namesNor hers Scene 2Scarves run toward the angelsThe angels are unusually blackIt’s said to be a costume partyIt’s said to be a cheerful consolationOf the deceased who is…
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WHEN OTHER PEOPLE ARE WRITING POEMS by Oh Kyu-won trans. Jack Jung (from KOREAN)
Sleep does not come for many nights. Today I waited for my unclosing eyes againand sleep fell asleep first and sleep’s clothes and shoesand door talisman went to sleep tooI alone lowered my gaze and watched sleepwho was sleeping without me. Exhausted sleep collapsed beside me and curled its bodyand snored ever so lightly.Where is my…
From the Archives
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