My poetic writing is a carpet. Unfurled, it displays the colorful strands of my linguistic development, regionalisms and academic language alike. The results of this writing are not works of genius, not creations of one singular genius. They are iridescent and ambiguous exposures, spotlights bringing some of the world’s previously invisible facets into focus.
Sergei is a proud, almost ideological beer drinker, but getting drunk for him is secondary to the sacred ritual of inebriated male bonding. In other words, he is sentimental.
One might think you’d have to know a band’s music to have much interest in the “behind-the-scenes,” but Carroll manages to draw the reader in with quirky bits of nostalgia. Lines like “They had two songs about farting, and one song about setting lawns on fire. I’m pretty sure their drummer is a cop now. . .” capture the banality and naivety of aspiring musicians—tales of recording sessions, inter...
Oil production shrinks, corporations only secure / cash flows in downstream oil. A downward spiral / The fat red balloon has burst / The pink scoop of strawberry ice cream has fallen / out of the cone and melted on boiling hot asphalt
Nearly a century before Dorle’s death, twenty-odd years before she met her many lovers on ships and at parties, a mob of poor angry Jews from the Lower East Side who had lost their savings at her family’s bank surrounded their upper Manhattan apartment building and rioted. When I learned the bare outline of an essential family story that neither my parents nor I knew anything about, I screwed up...
A digressive approach gave me the freedom to shape a narrative ostensibly about my “routine surgery” into a detailed portrait of my world and my state of mind during those two particular weeks of my life.
My eldest brother was the only one who wasn’t afraid to voice what had always been so conspicuously absent from the family lore: when Himmler allowed our grandfather to be released from prison, he said, it must have been on some condition.
Experiences of war and violence leave their mark on families over generations. This is not to weigh the suffering of the perpetrators against that of the victims. But a great deal did change in our family—a family, if you will, of perpetrators, or at least on their side.
It is a disorienting time to be gay in the world, in America. Rainbows and “love is love” in one realm, vicious hate coming from another. Some of us celebrate Gay Uncles Day on Facebook while, for others, calling queer people child molesters is a winning electoral strategy. Some of our families love and accept us, and many of our marriages may soon be invalidated in the states...
Thomas Dolby once said that he writes songs like a frustrated novelist. I like to say that I write books like a frustrated musician. I first started out writing lyrics to songs I was making in high school. Then I moved to writing poems before migrating towards stories and, eventually, novels. No surprise, my early poems were mostly about music and musicians as well. So, I think it’s always...
The Roe v Wade decision represented something like the invention of the light bulb or of penicillin—a turning point after which the world was permanently, irrevocably changed for the better. Not that all women’s problems were solved, but we had secured something fundamental to the free existence that I took for granted—like the sticky-pink amoxicillin solution that I...
Tears were a sexual thing. The wet light brimming beneath her long lashes made Rachel’s eyes more beautiful. I wanted her to cry, to make her despair by just kissing her, whispering in her licked ear. I closed my eyes, let my mouth travel down her solid body, following unreeling shapes in my mind, like the primitive landscapes on a radarscope.
Statement of Record