Author: Scott LaClaire

Self-Portrait of an Arizona Snowman; Letter to Antarctica as One Big Polaroid Slide Developing Spring; Small Talk of a Scarecrow; Self-Portrait of an Abominable Snowman in Ski Game; Sticky Note to the Moon; & These Leaders Are Here for You

By Jeevan Anthony Narney
From the Summer 2020 Issue

 

Sticky Note to the Moon

 

What a dust bunny you are in space.
America hacked into you, put a flag on your face.
You are not the sun, duh.
You white twisty tie on a bagged day.
You …

Jeevan Anthony Narney

Jeevan Anthony Narney was born in India but grew up in Arizona. He is a Returned Peace Corps Volunteer, Kundiman Fellow, and a teaching artist for the Nebraska Writers Collective. His work has appeared in the Bellevue Literary Review, Terrain.org, Spiral Orb, The Drunken Boat, and Right Hand Pointing. He received his MFA in creative writing from the University of Arizona and currently teaches at Metropolitan Community College in Omaha, Nebraska.

The Murmuring Grief of the Americas [You are on the ground] & The Murmuring Grief of the Americas [there are children crossing the river]

By Daniel Borzutzky
From the Summer 2020 Issue

 

The Murmuring Grief of the Americas

You are on the ground, wrapped in a ratty blanket at the edge of the cage. The interpreter wedges her way into the corner. She sits on her knees, brings her head to …

Daniel Borzutzky

Daniel Borzutzky is the author of Lake Michigan (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2018), finalist for the 2019 Griffin International Poetry Prize, and The Performance of Becoming Human (Brooklyn Arts Press), recipient of the 2016 National Book Award for Poetry. His other books include In the Murmurs of the Rotten Carcass Economy (Nightboat Books, 2015), Memories of My Overdevelopment (Kenning Editions, 2015), and The Book of Interfering Bodies (Nightboat Books, 2011). His translation of Galo Ghigliotto’s Valdivia (co-im-press, 2016) received the 2017 ALTA National Translation Award. He teaches in the English and Latin American and Latino Studies departments at the University of Illinois at Chicago.

Amazon; Forests; Monarch; Quiet; & Yoga

By Mark Yakich Christopher Schaberg
From the Summer 2020 Issue
…

Mark Yakich

Mark Yakich’s most recent book is Spiritual Exercises (Penguin Poets, 2019). He lives in New Orleans.

Christopher Schaberg, the Dorothy Harrell Brown Distinguished Professor of English at Loyola University New Orleans, is the author of five books, including, most recently, Searching for the Anthropocene: A Journey into the Environmental Humanities (2019) and The Work of Literature in an Age of Post-Truth (2018), both from Bloomsbury.

A Kiss for the Absolute & The Cactus Brothers, translated from the Japanese by Mary Jo Bang and Yuki Tanaka

By Shuzo Takiguchi
From the Summer 2020 Issue
…

Shuzo Takiguchi (1903–1979) was one of the most prominent Japanese Surrealists. He corresponded with André Breton and translated his 1928 Surrealism and Painting into Japanese two years after it was published in France. Because of his association with the French Surrealists, Takiguchi was imprisoned in 1941 by the Japanese “thought police” and held for more than eight months. After his release, he stopped writing and reinvented himself as a visual artist and art critic. In 1967, admirers of his work collected the individual poems that had previously only appeared in magazines and published them in Japan as The Poetic Experiments 1927–1937.

Olm & Where But to Think Is to Be Full of Sorrow

By Brooks Haxton
From the Summer 2020 Issue
…

Brooks Haxton teaches in the graduate writing programs at Syracuse University and Warren Wilson College. In February 2021, his new poems will appear in Mister Toebones, his seventh collection from Alfred A. Knopf.

Out of Nothingness; Harakiri; Treatise on Passion and Adulation; & Water Riddle, translated from the Arabic by Thoraya El-Rayyes

By Hisham Bustani
From the Summer 2020 Issue

 

Harakiri

Yukio Mishima, why did you kill yourself like that? Why did you slowly plunge the sword into your insides and turn it? Why did you sit breathing in your slow death, watching your blood drain onto the floor—without …

Hisham Bustani

Hisham Bustani is an award-winning Jordanian author of five collections of short fiction and poetry. His work has been translated into several languages and appeared in many journals, such as the Kenyon Review, Black Warrior Review, The Poetry Review, Modern Poetry in Translation, and the Los Angeles Review of Books Quarterly. His fiction has been collected in The Best Asian Short Stories, The Ordinary Chaos of Being Human: Tales from Many Muslim Worlds, and The Radiance of the Short Story: Fiction from Around the Globe, among other anthologies. Bustani has received the Rockefeller Foundation’s Bellagio Fellowship for Artists and Writers and is the Arabic fiction editor of the Amherst College–based literary review The Common.

Ashes and Quartz; What I Should Have Told the Hypnotist; CBD Dream on 9/11; & Percocet Dream after Root-Canal Surgery

By Henry Hart
From the Summer 2020 Issue
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Henry Hart has published four books of poetry, including his most recent, Familiar Ghosts (Orchises Press, 2014). His poems and essays have appeared in journals such as The New Yorker, the Southern Review, the Yale Review, the Sewanee Review, and the Kenyon Review. His biography James Dickey: The World as a Lie (Picador, 2000) was runner-up for a Southern Book Critics Circle Award. Wiley-Blackwell published his biography The Life of Robert Frost in 2017, and he has published critical books on Seamus Heaney, Robert Lowell, and Geoffrey Hill. He is currently the Hickman Professor of Humanities at the College of William and Mary and poet laureate of Virginia.

Achilles; On Being Thrown from a Horse at 49; & Verge

By A. E. Stallings
From the Summer 2020 Issue


Verge

Sanctuary of Artemis at Brauron
A prayer for daughters, for Myrto and Atalanta
τάς τε κόρας, Λιμνᾶτι, κόρᾳ κόρα, ὡς ἐπιεικές

 

Day-trip from Athens, on a day
Too fine for anyone to stay

Within the walls—and so we …

A. E. Stallings

A. E. Stallings studied classics at the University of Georgia in Athens, and now lives in Athens, Greece. Like (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2018), her latest collection of poems, was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. She has also recently published verse translations of Hesiod’s Works and Days (Penguin Classics, 2018), and the pseudo-Homeric Battle Between the Frogs and the Mice (Paul Dry Books, 2019). In November 2019, she was inducted into the Georgia Writers Hall of Fame.

Confidants

By Don Lee
From the Summer 2020 Issue
…

Don Lee is the author of the novels Lonesome Lies Before Us (2017), The Collective (2012), Wrack and Ruin (2008), and Country of Origin (2004), and the story collection Yellow (2001), all published by W. W. Norton. He has received an American Book Award, the Asian/Pacific American Award for Literature, the Edgar Award for Best First Novel, and the Sue Kaufman Prize for First Fiction. He teaches in the MFA program in creative writing at Temple University.