Context Collapse is a long, mock-academic, critical essay poem. Beginning in ancient Greece and continuing beyond the present, it examines how the increasingly wide gulf between poets and their audiences are mediated by new communications technologies and changes in publishing economies, and how this, in turn, significantly impacts poetic form.
His father, the county doctor, loved him. He read to him even when he returned tired from his rounds, from Miss Biddle with her gout and Judge Jackson with his ever-weakening heart and all the others in the countryside who needed him. When he turned eight, the doctor gave the boy books for his birthday.
“You have reached the age of reason,” the doctor...
M. starts a new round of chemotherapy treatment. It’s been a year now, roughly, since we first came here, in my memory the trees were still bare. Could that be possible? Seems such a very long time ago. M. gets out of the car, walks off, across this little wasteland of tree stumps and rubble left over from the recent carnage on this site, so heavy with history, so...
A piece of tissue-thin onion-skin paper to which you pressed your vermilion-inked seal, and so sealed my fate. Belying the fragility of the parchment, it is an iron-clad document that “releases” me—as if I were a prisoner or a caged animal—from the mother who wanted me and the motherland that did not, to cross the great, roiling ocean to call another, “Mother.”
Wake. Navigate through dark to bathroom, avoiding areas of floor known to creak. Lower self onto toilet, careful not to ram forehead into waist-high crown molding on opposite wall. Pee. Skip handwashing. Return to bed. Turn over phone, whose screen stayed lit all...
I think you’re going to like my new work, by the way. I’m anxious to show it to you. (Letter from Joan in Berlin to Steven in New York, undated, 1987.)
I never forget Joan’s birthday because it is the same as my mother’s, September 1. I never forget the date on which Hitler invaded Poland and started World War II because it is the day my...
When you’re twenty-six and it’s 1991 and you walk into an emergency room in Tucson with a racing heart, everyone thinks you’re on coke. “We aren’t the police,” they say, hoping you’ll fess up. They believe they’re being wise and supportive, the nurse and the other nurse, and...
The river looked grey and cold that morning with its little whorls of current that appeared every few yards like dimples. Above was the low-hanging sky, autumnal, bright white, almost blinding. I remember I had my book out and tried to read it, but my mind was elsewhere. I felt scattered. Maybe fatigued is a better word. I was fatigued by the thought of the workday...
We meet the small press editor/protagonist of Jon Roemer’s new novel Five Windows doing what he does throughout much of the novel, gazing out his window at a...
Think the word “lonely.” See the little girl moping in the corner of the schoolyard or the homeless man hunched over a grate. When one reads that some well-known person was lonely, isn’t there always a small twinge of surprise? One thinks, it must mean ‘lonely’ on the inside. To be really alone in the world is to be young, innocent—or to be so much...
Can we “be” as a statement? Exist as an exploration? Represent a philosophy with our own bones? Norwegian author Edy Poppy’s curious interplay of life and writing unravel in her novel Anatomy. Monotony.
How would you live, if you knew your actions—even the most intimate ones—could be...
It’s late. We’re hungry. We catch a bus in the direction of Kentish Town. I run up the stairs, while the American buys tickets...
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