Winter 2014
Table of Contents
Essays
“Living Toward That Voice”: James Wright Transfixing and Transfixed
A Kind of Centering
A Young Communist in Love: Philip Rahv, Partisan Review, and My Mother
After Yitzl
Ashes, Ashes
Carson McCullers and the South
Deliverance from What
Gone with the Wind as Bildungsroman or Why Did Rhett Butler Really Leave Scarlett O’Hara?
London & a Friend
Mark Twain: At Home in the Gilded Age
Myths and the Man: James Edward Oglethorpe
On Loose Thread
Stories That Fit My Hands
The Coronation of Realism
The Grand Captain of Clausewitz and The Marxist Professional Revolutionary
Transcendental Conservatism and “The House of the Seven Gables”
Fiction
At Any Given Time
Being Stevie
Bodies At Sea
Cat
Don’t Worry About the Kids
Hambone
No Shade Ever
One Time
Piano Lessons
Retrograde Mountain Time
Rock and Roll: Triptych
The All and Nothing It Had Come To
The Dangerous Lay of the Land
The Front Porch
The Thirteen Wonders of Tammy
Poetry
A Cornflower Paloma
Abridged Taxonomy of Light
All My Life; Little Secular Symmetry Song; Proximity Song; The Neutron Bomb; & Babies Bigger Than Thought
An Ordinary Evening in Bowling Green; Growing Wild; Certain Dreams; & Getting Together
And I Thought of Glass Flowers
Apology to a Poll-Taker; April Again; & Housewifery
Apostrophe to S
Ars Poetica with Heron and Dance
Brink
Burning the Old Store
Children’s Fall
Circe
Coleridge Near Porlock
Conjugations
Desert Storm & Bear Man Martin Spills the Beans
Disproportionate & A Partial List of Unacknowledged Musics (Feel Free to Add Your Own)
Dream Dreams
Easy
Enough
Homage
I Want Back Everything I’ve Laid on the Altar & When Lightning Split the Plum Tree
In the Chapter “Rodin in Love”
In the Stark Lands
Inbetween Deaths
Laments
Madrigal
Morning Shore; Baker Man; & The Birds
On the Night My Hands Get Fed
Once Upon a Time
Paul’s Wholesale Florist
Pre-Latter-Day Love Poem
Reading a Poetry Magazine on the Train
The Border Guard
The Cartographer Gets Lost; Self-Portrait as Alone with Thoughts; & Pisces
The Congregating of Stars & Particular Falls
The Hobo’s Invitation
The Major Holidays
The Unwritten Laws of Gravitational Isolation in Warren, Michigan
Two Stories
Vandall’s Song & Federal Pen
What We Know Is Not What We Feel
Young of the Year
Art
Reviews
A Personal Map of the Past (on Edward McPherson’s The History of the Future: American Essays)
Against the Grain: Interviews with Maverick American Publishers by Robert Dana
Footprints (on John Gimlette’s Elephant Complex: Travels in Sri Lanka; Rob Schmitz’s Street of Eternal Happiness; Robert Moor’s On Trails; Richard Tillinghast’s Journeys into the Mind of the World: A Book of Places; and Malachy Tallack’s The Un-Discovered Islands)
Just How New Is the Terror Paradigm? (on The Terror Dream: Fear and Fantasy in Post-9/11 America by Susan Faludi; The End of America: Letter of Warning to a Young Patriot by Naomi Wolf; Takeover: The Return of the Imperial Presidency and the Subversion of American Democracy by Charlie Savage; The Terror Presidency: Law and Judgment Inside the Bush Administration by Jack Goldsmith; and Monstering: Inside America’s Policy of Secret Interrogations and Torture in the Terror War by Tara McElvey)
Keeping Company (on Quote Poet Unquote: Contemporary Quotations on Poets and Poetry, edited by Dennis O’Driscoll; A Time in Xanadu by Lars Gustafsson, translated by John Irons; Yellowrocket by Todd Boss; The Invention of the Kaleidoscope by Paisley Rekdal; In Praise of Aunts by M. R. Peacocke; National Anthem by Kevin Prufer; Want by Rick Barot; and Glory River by David Huddle)
Memoirs on Our Mind (on I’ve Heard the Vultures Singing: Field Notes on Poetry, Illness, and Nature by Lucia Perillo; Room for Doubt by Wendy Lesser; Learning to Fly: A Writer’s Memoir by Mary Lee Settle; Kinfolks: Falling Off the Family Tree: The Search for My Melungeon Ancestors by Lisa Alther; Bigger than Life: A Murder, a Memoir by Dinah Lenney; and Just Breathe Normally by Peggy Shumaker)
Old Frontiers / New Images (on Portraits and Dreams: Photographs and Stories by Children of the Appalachians by Wendy Ewald; In the American West: 1979-1984 by Richard Avedon; & Rich and Poor by Jim Goldberg)
on 3 Nations Anthology: Native, Canadian & New England Writers, edited by Valerie Lawson
on Acts of Attention: The Poems of D. H. Lawrence by Sandra M. Gilbert
on Afterings by Deborah Tall
on Bestiary by Donika Kelly
on Big Thicket Blues by Natalie Giarratano
on Blake’s Sublime Allegory: Essays on The Four Zoas, Milton, Jerusalem by Stuart Curran, Joseph A. Wittreich
on Certain Relevant Passages by Joe Manning
on Collected Poems, 1951-1971 by A. R. Ammons
on Fictional Transfigurations of Jesus by Theodore Ziolkowski
on Fifteen American Authors Before 1900: Bibliographic Essays on Research and Criticism by Robert A. Rees, Earl N. Harbert
on From Sundown To Sunup: The Making Of The Black Community (volume I Of The American Slave: A Composite Autobiography) by George P. Rawick; The Slave Community: Plantation Life In The Antebellum South by John W. Blassingame
on From the Mountain by Helen White, Redding S. Sugg, Jr.; & Hillbilly Women by Kathy Kahn
on Irish Poetry after Joyce by Dillon Johnston
on Metaphors of Self: The Meaning of Autobiography by James Olney
on Poems in Persons: An Introduction to the Psychoanalysis of Literature by Norman N. Holland
on Song of the Sky: Versions of Native American Songs and Poems by Brian Swann
on The Earth Avails by Mark Wunderlich
on The Gray and the Black: The Confederate Debate on Emancipation by Robert F. Durden
on The Mystery of Iniquity: Melville as Poet, 1857-1891 by William H. Shurr
on The Next Place by Al Maginnes
on The Real West Marginal Way: A Poet’s Autobiography by Richard Hugo, Ripley S. Hugo, Lois Welch, James Welch
on The Rise of the New York Intellectuals: Partisan Review and Its Circle, 1934-1945 by Terry A. Cooney
on The Tragi-comedy of Pen Browning by Maisie Ward
on To Dwell in Sound by Jean Réti
on Unfathomable City: A New Orleans Atlas edited by Rebecca Solnit & Rebecca Snedeker
on Where the North Sea Touches Alabama by Allen C. Shelton
on Workable Design: Action and Situation in the Fiction of Henry James by John P. O’Neill
The Last Noël (on The Letters of Noël Coward, edited by Barry Day)
The Moments that Matter (on Only the Little Bone by David Huddle & And Venus Is Blue by Mary Hood)
The Whirlpool of Image and Narrative Flow (on Second Language by Lisel Mueller; Sometimes Music Rises by Wayne Dodd; The Happy Man by Donald Hall; Unending Blues by Charles Simic; Living Gloves by Lynn Doyle; & Cemetery Nights by Stephen Dobyns)
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