by Doug Carlson
Let’s face it: the nexus of American nature writing resides in the mountains. To have hiked at a mile high—at least, but preferably twice that—and written about it is almost a required endeavor. Gary Ferguson has done this and more. He’s bona fide; he’ll make a good spokesperson. His trail-essay books come out of the tradition of an author-guide leading readers into wild areas for delight and instruction. . . .
Read more
by Andrea Hollander
I didn’t know he was married,
didn’t know I wasn’t the only one
who believed he had landed
in my life like an out-of-season
blue heron, singular and sunlit
at the edge of a lake, a figure
in a woodblock print, . . .
Read more
by Jessica Hollander
I drag myself from bed with a magazine of white smiles clamped beneath my elbow, and I’m almost alive in the ruined hallway. Mold dots the floorboards; the ceiling’s splotched gray from water leakage—It’s old markings, our landlord said, Call me if the spots spread. . . .
Read more
by Erin Adair-Hodges
Sure, it’s all Chekhov this and Chekhov that,
and I am far from the only one
to keep myself up at night
thinking about his gun,
but the man was a dreamboat,
gray eyes and smirking beard
and lips—those lips. . . .
Read more
by Coleman Barks
Ten years ago I drove down to Barnesville
to see my friend, the artist Herb Creecy,
who was dying of pancreatic cancer.
He chose this way to end up: No hospital. . . .
Read more
by Judson Mitcham
What matters most is private and vast and can’t be seen
on the brain scan, though it may burn orange or blue
or a toasty gold in the amygdala,
a magnolia-green in the cingulum, the cinnamon
or burnt wine of an old tin roof all through the fornix. . . .
Read more
by Karen Hays
“You dork!” my sister shouted the day I called to tell her
I thought I might be pregnant. “Haven’t you checked
yet? Go to the pharmacy and call me back! Sheesh.”
1. FOLK ACOUSTICS
When we were in elementary school, . . .
Read more
by Carol Ann Davis
Oil has seeped into
the margins of the ditch of standing water
and flashes or looks upward brokenly,
like bits of mirror—no, more blue than that:
like tatters of the Morpho butterfly.
—Elizabeth Bishop
How young were my boys when I moved them to a town, . . .
Read more
by Robert Wrigley
If the trout died it would not be
as motionless as it is now,
in a current a man cannot
stand in and under which looser
stones go tumbling from their sockets.
Across its back it seems sunlight
is what’s swimming, . . .
Read more
by Kate Harris
Tibetan Plateau
My obsession with borders was born all at once in three different countries, depending on who you ask. I was in my early twenties, biking with a friend across the parched soda plains of the Askai Chin. For weeks we traversed this high-altitude wilderness, a land spread wide as wings, . . .
Read more