e Risky, the Bold, the Audacious: A Remembrance of Lucie Brock-Broido, 1956-2018

facedown, his whole body shaking, he heard one of them ask his mother where she kept her money. She said she had no money and that she was a civil servant.

“You have no money, and you live in an estate?” he said, and his mother said nothing.

“We will take something from you before we leave whether you like it or not,” he said.

He peeped at them through one eye and watched as one of them wrapped his hand around his mother’s neck and used his palm to cover her mouth. Her cries became mu ed, but she didn’t stop crying. Tijani begged her to stop crying. He told the men his mother was telling the truth. His mother always told the truth no matter what. Why would she lie now? He now wept, fear tearing at his gut as his pleas went unheeded. His assailant held him down as he struggled to break free, kicking and scratching and spitting. Another slap landed on his face. He could hear his ear ring. e man who had been addressing his mother grinned as he watched her struggle. Disgust and rage coursed through Tijani’s veins when the man snapped his belt buckle free and kicked o his trousers. Tijani broke free for a few seconds, but his assailant caught him again. He sank his teeth into his attacker’s arm. e man screamed and tossed Tijani across the room. Tijani tried to stand but his attacker grabbed his ri e from the bed and marched toward him. e rst blow from the butt of the ri e hit the side of his face. He felt the ground shift under his feet; pain surged through his head. e second blow landed before he could gather himself, turning his vision white. Tijani raised one arm up in a futile attempt to block another blow, but the butt of the ri e rammed into his left eye. Blood rushed in before darkness engulfed him.

Tijani drifted in and out of consciousness, letting out clipped groans. He knew he was in the back seat of a moving vehicle, but he did not know how he got there or where he was going. He heard voices. He saw blurred faces through his good eye. He tried to organize his muddled thoughts through the pain, the pain wracking through his body, the excruciating throbbing in his head. A certain feeling of danger gripped him. He opened

his mouth to cry for help, but his voice sounded like the rasping of a sheep. Or was it his voice? He felt disconnected from his body.

Warm hands gripped him, moved him out of the car. He lost consciousness, then came to again.

“Hold him very well, okay, yes. Careful. Don’t let him fall. Call the doctor, please. Where is the doctor or a nurse? Any nurse.”

His nose caught the faint whi of antiseptic. He heard wheels groaning against the ground under him before drifting o into the dark again.

Tijani counts his cash for the wedding photos and gets into his car, his camera in the passenger’s seat. e tra c is horrible today as usual. A buzz runs through a group of men gathered by the roadside. From one end, a short man emerges, completely naked. He throws rapid punches into the air, his head jerking from side to side. Tijani quickly picks up his camera, his pulse racing. Click! Click! Click!

On the other side, there is a rush. Another fellow comes forward, equally bare-assed. He is tall and has an athletic build that emphasizes the torso and shrinks the waist. He throws hooks and jabs at an invisible opponent, as if to foretaste what he wants to do to the real one. A motley crowd cheers. People watch, but they are not sure what is happening, and no one wants to move close to the two men. Lagos is crazy, he thinks, but this? Click! Click! Click!

Traders gawk from stalls. Pedestrians gather on both sides of the road, seized by the spectacle. People sitting outside their houses spring up in surprise. A mother clutches her son close to her and quickens her pace. A group of women keep their eyes averted as they walk by. He catches a breath and takes aim again. Click! Click! Click! e ghters circle each other, their bodies glistening in the midday sun. e crowds chant. e two men close in on each other, hitting each other in the face and torso. Seconds later, the short guy is on the ground. e crowd roars. e tall one dashes back into the crowd and emerges with a bottle of water. He guzzles most of it and, with a supercilious air, throws the

rest on himself. He then faces the cheering crowd, holding up his hand like a champ. Click! Click! Click! e police don’t show up, but the crowd disperses as quickly as they gathered. It reminds Tijani of Adamu Street, where you never know what you’ll wake up to or see before the day ends. He sometimes drives through his old neighborhood, drives past the beer parlor down Adamu Street, past his old house, memories of his old life, his old self. e tra c doesn’t let up, and Tijani takes more pictures even though he is exhausted and slightly on edge––the calligraphical inscriptions on the back of trucks and commuter buses, a station wagon so overburdened by sacks of produce that it wobbles along sideways like a crab. He directs his lens away from a roadside beggar swatting ies from his gangrenous leg. Tijani heaves a heavy sigh when the road clears up soon after.

He makes his way to his mother’s house, but not before stopping at the roadside fruit stall and lling a bag with mangos, guavas, and oranges. His mother’s house is now armed with burglar-proof doors and windows from the rst big money he earned as a wedding photographer––some senator’s daughter from the east who got married. His mother is in the kitchen peeling yams for porridge. He drops the bag of fruit on the table and o ers to help, but she says no. Instead, she insists on feeding him before he leaves, complaining about how skinny he is before pinching his cheek. He feels his mother’s wet ngers and smiles through his exhaustion. He steps out of the house to fetch his camera from his car and casually scroll through the wedding pictures in the kitchen to distract himself. He weeds out the imperfect shots and zooms in and out. She asks how work went, and she comes to see some of his shots. She reeks of fried sh.

“I am praying and waiting for the day people will attend your own wedding too, my son,” she says as she walks back to the cutting board on the kitchen counter. It’s her roundabout way of saying life is passing by even though Tijani feels he is still young. He says amen, but he is annoyed. She always does this. Who wants to be with a one-eyed man anyway? She sees that his feelings are hurt and begins to pepper him with encouraging words, but her words don’t encourage him. ey su ocate him.

He tells her to stop, raising his voice, and his mother throws a vicious look at him. He knows that look, the kind that often comes before a backhand slap, but he is now a grown man. She uses words now.

“I should keep my dirty mouth shut, right?” his mother says.

“ at’s not what I said, Mummy.”

“Now you are calling your mother crazy!”

“What?”

“Just because you brought me some rotten fruits, you think you can call me names?”

Her words pierce through him. He opens his mouth to defend himself, but he thinks better of it. It would only make things worse, so he makes a half-hearted apology and goes back to scrolling. But he can’t stop thinking. Finally, the pressure inside him bubbles, threatening to froth over, so he stands up and turns to leave. His mother calls his name as he approaches the door.

“Where are you going?” she asks.

For a moment, he hesitates, but thinks he should leave. He thinks about many things. He tells himself that he doesn’t resent his mother. He knows he loves her more than anything else in this world.

On his way to his house, he realizes he is angry mainly at himself. He realizes that neither love nor time can thoroughly wash the anger and the self-pity away. Like the sand on Elegushi Beach, it will still be there. He feels a sudden lurch of guilt that he walked out on his mother. To distract himself, he thinks about the naked street ght. It’s funny what people do when they have no dignity left or are stripped of all hope, leaving what is primal and impulsive. But then what if the ght was to keep hope alive? What if their agrant display of shamelessness was an attempt to distract from their shame?

When Tijani woke up in the hospital, his head felt like too much weight on his neck. en it all came back, trashing its way through his esh––the rage, the rancid breath of the assailant, the fear of his mother’s imminent

danger. Kicking his legs about the bed, he became aware of a hand holding him still, calling his name. He tried to turn to see who it was but became gripped by so much pain that he screamed.

“It’s me, my son; I am here. I am okay.” It was his mother’s voice. She tightened her grip on his hand. Seconds later he was able see bright lights out of his right eye, but his left vision remained hazy red. en he saw the intravenous line taped to his arm, the bag with uid hanging on a rusty metal pole. en he smelled his blood, heard the beeping of the machines, and the shu ing noises against the linoleum tiles. A wave of recollection hit him and the relief knowing his mother was alive was soon replaced by the fear of considering the unthinkable. What did those bastards do to his mother?

His recovery took three months. Tijani battled with pain, headaches, blurry vision, and dizziness. He grieved the loss of his left eye and wondered if his life would ever be normal. He blamed himself for being reckless by ghting with armed men while scolding himself for not being strong enough to fend them o . He asked himself if any of what happened would have happened if they had not moved to that estate and had stayed in their lowly tenement apartment. Sometimes scenes from that night played repeatedly in his head. When the question of what happened after he passed out arose in his mind, he pushed it away. He did not have the courage to ask his mother about that day.

During those three months of recovery, his mother hovered around him and kept vigil at his bedside. She did not go home or wash or change for days, and mosquitoes feasted on her. During the day, she bought medicine, collected test results and radiographic lms, and turned up with asks of food for him. Weeks later, she lost her job.

He saw guilt written all over his mother whenever she looked at him, and sometimes little tears made the corner of her eyes glisten. He saw pity in her eyes. He didn’t want her to pity him. He wanted her to be proud of him, so he vowed on his sickbed to make her happy. He vowed to make something out of his life. e night before he was discharged, she held his hand and spoke to him with tear-laced voice.

“ at night you not only saved my life but saved me from shame. When the robbers saw what they did to you, they ran away. God intervened. ank you, my son.”

Tears brimmed over his eyes in a great ood.

He started wearing an eye patch to cover the damage done to his eye. His condition earned him a lot of ridicule throughout secondary school, even at the beginning of his study at the Polytechnic when he was 24. On campus, he was confronted with the feeling he had tried to deny since the attack. He had felt that if he went away for higher education, put some distance between him and his mother, then he would be able to shake o the bitterness. During his study, he threw her letters away unopened and ignored her midnight prayer calls. He would not have done that to someone else. No one else mattered that much to him. His mother’s responses to his behavior alternated between bursts of anger and concerned questioning. en she traveled to his school and barged into his dormitory.

“Have you joined a bad gang? Are you taking drugs? Why don’t you want to talk to your mother? You want to abandon me like your father.”

She cried, her eyes glistening. Tijani saw the same fear he had seen in his mother’s eyes the day of the attack. He never thought he would see her like that again. He felt remorseful. And he decided then that he could no longer blame his mother Blaming her would compound an already di cult situation for her. at day, he reminded himself that he was the only person his mother had.

Years later, when it was time for him to look for jobs, he realized that the one-eyed man was an afterthought in the world where the full-visioned struggled. At 28, he could no longer tell himself that his life wasn’t a total failure.

Right after he graduated and returned home, he went back to his dad’s broken camera. at was one thing he had never forgotten. He tinkered with it again, trying to see if he could x it. en he decided to save for a new camera. e rst picture he took with his new Canon lm camera was a mural close to the beer parlor down Adamu Street that had not been there before. It bore the image of Albert Einstein holding a sign with the inscription

FOLLOW YOUR DREAMS. He took a good look at the concrete wall. It struck him as odd that they placed such a mural next to a drinking establishment, but staring at Einstein’s mustachioed face, eyebrows that looked as though they were going to escape, and frizzy hair sticking out in all directions had a strange e ect on him. He couldn’t tell whether Einstein was happy or excited in the painting but found himself staring into his calm, dark eyes. A line from an Emily Dickinson poem, a favorite from one of his father’s old books, struck him.

Hope is the thing with feathers—that perches in the soul and sings the tune without the words . . .

He developed his lms with k-foto, an establishment two streets away, and asked Kayode Ajisafe, the owner, to let him into the darkroom each time he went there. Although he could not see very well in the darkroom, he loved going there. He loved blending with the dark. He loved the focus that came from making prints from a roll of lm. He loved the darkness. He loved that in the darkroom he was unseen, and therefore he could temporarily shed his problems. In the darkroom he felt no shame.

Now, Tijani drives Adamu Street and parks right across from the beer parlor near the power transformer. Everything feels familiar but also di erent— blackened walls, peeling paint, the Albert Einstein mural now faded by the elements. Einstein’s face is gone, chipped away by cracks running deep into the walls.

Inside the beer parlor, glasses clink, and the air is lled with murmur and cigarette smoke. Tijani occupies one of the two empty bar stools and orders a drink. e night stretches as he keeps asking the bartender to ll his tumbler. en the time comes when without looking up, he breaks into a chuckle as he remembers the line from Dickinson’s poem. . . . that perches in the soul and sings the tune without the words . . . e words, like Einstein’s face on the wall, no longer mean anything to him. He wonders if his father was ever here, in this bar. He curses him in his mind, wishes he gets syphilis or something. en he decides his

father is taking too much space in his muddled brain and scans the bar with his single eye to see which unaccompanied lady in the bar would talk to a photographer with an eye patch. He psyches himself up, smooths the wrinkles on his shirt, but he is interrupted by a female voice.

“I love your eye patch.” e woman sidles up to him and sends a mouthful of cigarette smoke towards his face. Tijani smiles and immediately thinks he should tell her that the eye patch is real. He should tell her his story. Maybe she’d see his bravery. Perhaps she’d pity him. Tonight, he doesn’t mind being pitied. Tomorrow, he will wake up with little memory of a night of drunkenness. He will have no bitterness and shame from the previous day. Tomorrow, he will prepare to take more contracts for wedding pictures, capture more happy memories, and make more money to care for his beloved mother. Tomorrow, things will be di erent, but tonight he doesn’t mind being pitied.

Tijani breaks into a crooked smile.

“What do you like to drink?” he asks the woman.

The last time I saw Lucie Brock-Broido, we were shopping at my local Target, in Carlisle, Pennsylvania, in 2006. e previous night, she had given a erce, and ercely funny, reading at Dickinson College at my invitation, and now she was about to drive back to New York. In addition to the reading, a class visit, and a party at my house, Lucie had agreed to an informal gathering with students, on the condition that it take place in a Starbucks.

Carlisle’s only Starbucks is inside Target. My memory of that session is mainly of the late-afternoon sun making it di cult to see anyone, and of exhaustion from having stayed up most of the night talking with Lucie, whose nocturnal ways seemed both cause and e ect of the otherworldliness of her poems, after the party.

No one but Lucie Brock-Broido had ever been allowed to smoke in my house; my tiny kitchen made it smokier. “I’m going to be 50!” she had said over the “wonton soup without wontons” she had requested. “Isn’t that an unbelievable injustice?” And I was going to be 40. It didn’t seem possible that just over a decade separated us. As my professor in college, she had appeared as wise and formed as I was unwise and unformed.

Now, the students having gone back to campus, Lucie and I walked out of the Starbucks and into the Target. One of the worst things about New York City, we agreed, was that you couldn’t bring home carloads of cleaning products, shampoo, and toothpaste from megastores. She piled her cart with daily things—most memorably, huge packs of paper towels and toilet paper. For me, for reasons I can’t remember, she threw in a multipack of Pringles. At the checkout, she joked to the cashier that I was the one buying the toilet paper, and wasn’t her friend going overboard? We piled everything into her car, I told her how to get on I-81 and thanked her for the visit and Pringles, we hugged, and she drove away.

I met Lucie in the fall of 1988, my last year at Harvard. I had spent the previous year at Fudan University in Shanghai, where I hoped to nd a world of poetry more or less like the contemporary American one, but in Chinese. at was, of course, one of the many ways in which I was unwise; I did not appreciate how unfree Chinese speech was and how little space its population had for literary anything. Another unwise motivation was that I had convinced myself that the English literary canon didn’t want me and

I needed to connect with the Chinese one. Of course, true to everyone’s warnings, the People’s Republic of China in 1987–88 turned out to be an oppressed and oppressive place, bearing little resemblance to the China I had constructed in my head from the Penguin Poems of the Late T’ang, the Analects of Confucius, the folktales from my language classes, and my parents’ pre-Communist childhood anecdotes.

So when I met Lucie at a reception after a literary event at Harvard, I nally knew the obvious, that English was in every way my mother tongue and I was to some degree in the wrong major: East Asian Languages and Civilizations. It wasn’t fully wrong; I had simply come to understand that I had chosen it out of love for the study of languages, the point of which was to give more dimension to my use of English. I cherished my East Asian coursework, classmates, and professors, and had come back from China only to throw myself into the study of Japanese, which was completely unnecessary from a course-credit point of view but which deepened my understanding of syllabic verse forms, sentence fragments as a literary device, gendered speech, and a range of grammars (loose in Chinese, strict in Japanese, and strict with a thousand irrational exceptions in English). My proposed senior-thesis topics now kept getting rejected because they were Asian American rather than Asian, and creative rather than scholarly. If they belonged anywhere, it would be the English department, for which it was much too late.

Lucie’s rst question, “What are you doing?”, allowed me to sum everything up. I explained that all I wanted to do was write poems. Would it be all right if I just didn’t write a thesis? It would make me ineligible for honors beyond cum laude, and that was a bit of a drag because I’d been doing well, but would it ever matter?

She urged me to take her workshop, which was, like many things at Harvard, by application only. And then she spoke to me as if I were an actual poet: “If you write ten good poems in the next year, it’ll mean a lot more to you than a thesis.”

Now a seasoned professor myself, I ask: Who says this to an undergraduate, especially one whose poems you have never seen?

Lucie was the person I needed to meet at that juncture, an unusual teacher willing to do the reckless thing on behalf of poetry: to bet on the

student’s ability, rather than her likely inability paired with grandiosity. She herself had done something far more drastic, and much earlier in life, in service to poetry. As she told Guernica magazine in 2013, “I came to poetry because I felt I couldn’t live properly in the real world. I was 13 and in Algebra class. at was the day I decided I would be a poet for all time. I walked out of class and dropped out of school. at doesn’t mean I became a poet, but I did have this absolute severance with one period of my life where I felt I was being made to live in the world I was brought into—Straight-A student, e Most Perfect Little Girl—that I couldn’t inhabit anymore.” e speci cs are a bit more complicated; Lucie did not technically drop out, but she seems to have made a decision to stop trying to please every teacher and administrator, eventually switching to an alternative school where she could work independently. It was probably not obvious then that she would one day be a celebrated professor at Harvard and Columbia. By Lucie’s standard, I was coming to my “dropping-out” awfully late, and it was not much of one, especially when you looked to certain famous Harvard examples—Frost and Stevens, for example, didn’t even get their degrees.

As it turned out, three of the poems I wrote in her class made it into my rst book, Middle Kingdom, which appeared eight years later, in 1997. ree poems may not sound like a lot, but all working poets know how many poems get thrown away, or at least led in an archive of failures, on the way to a nished manuscript. One of the three was later revised again, but the kernel of its origin—a prompt from Lucie to write a “selfportrait”—remained the same. Another generous poet-guide, Mark Doty, whom I met in Provincetown, convinced me years later to make that poem, “Address,” the opening poem to the book.

Now that I have published my fth book, I can look back at the rst poem in my rst book and think of it as exactly what Mark called it—an announcement, a declaration of who I was going to be. I was going to write about what it means to be American, in all its confusion concerning race, language, class, and lore. I have not always written speci cally about that, but over 20 years later, it is exactly what I’m doing.

I have saved Lucie’s comments:

Final version, as published in Middle Kingdom:

ere are many ways of saying Chinese in American. One means restaurant. Others mean comprador, coolie, green army.

I’ve been practicing how to walk and talk, how to dress, what to do in a silk shop.

How to talk. American: Meiguo, second tone and third. e beautiful country.

In second grade we watched lms on King in Atlanta. How our nation was mistaken:

ey said we had hidden the Japanese in California. Everyone apologized to me.

But I am from Eldorado Drive in the suburbs. Sara Lee’s pound cake thaws in the heart

of the home, the parakeet bobs on a dowel, night doesn’t move. e slumber party teems in its spot in the dark

summer; the swimming pool gleams. Somewhere an inherited teapot is smashed by a baseball. ere may be spaces

in the wrong parts of the face, but America bursts with things it was never meant to have: the intent to outlast

the centerless acres, the wedding cake tiered to heaven. Every season a new crop of names,

like mine. It’s di erent because it ts on a typewriter, because it’s rst in its line,

because it is Adrienne. It’s French. It means artful.

Sometime after that rst meeting, I met with Lucie at the Paradiso, a spacious, well-lit cafe that disappeared from Harvard Square some years ago. Lucie had installed herself at a table for meetings with students. She must have been interviewing for her course, because I brought her a pile of poems. I was anxious to read all the Asian American poets I could nd, and as I talked about my journey to that category, which in today’s context seems as obvious as my trip back to English, Lucie said she felt similarly about being a woman writing to a predominantly male tradition. e way she said it was not dismissive; she genuinely felt like an interloper, too. I wished, after our conversation, that the poems I had turned in were more explicitly Asian-American; most were racially unmarked. But we ended up having plenty of opportunities to talk about those things.

My journal from that year mentions many phone calls from her, to suggest a poet to read (Li-Young Lee’s rst book, Rose, had just appeared, as had e Forbidden Stitch: An Asian American Women’s Anthology, edited by Shirley Geok-lin Lim), or to remind me to attend a reading. While it’s tempting to equate a phone call in 1989 with an email today, since the latter wasn’t an option, they are not equivalent; the former took as much time and e ort as it does today. At the time I didn’t think to wonder whether

Lucie was calling every student poet she knew. It seems impossible, but so do many of her achievements as both teacher and artist. Any time I have met other former students of hers, the same dreamy devotion comes up; we all seem to belong to a cult of Lucie. And it is thanks to one of her phone calls that I went to hear Rita Dove, Galway Kinnell, and Ellen Bryant Voigt one evening, and later ended up following Rita Dove to the University of Virginia, where, not incidentally, Lucie had studied as well. It is because of the author bio in Lucie’s book, which listed a fellowship at the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, that I set my sights on the Work Center, where I eventually spent a life-changing winter and met writers with whom I still exchange drafts and have shared many milestones.

Lucie’s class became a form of weekly worship for me—not that the sessions were perfect or all students fully committed to the cause, but I always took my poems as far as I could on my own and was anxious for a response. I was writing often in meter and rhyme and cutting mercilessly, hoping for gleaming edges and heightened intensity. One week, I spent so many hours obsessing over a single comma that when I used my “author’s chance to speak” after the workshop to ask about the comma, the class burst into laughter. So did I, once I realized what I’d been doing. Lucie inspired in us that perfectionism tempered with moments of sudden, self-aware levity. All that year, I kept going back to the only book she had published then—A Hunger, a collection su used with loss, thwarted desire, and speakers in extreme circumstances, but not lacking in humor.

For instance, from “Autobiography”:

It is only three o’clock & already I’m alone Listening to the lovers next door Like Patsy Cline & her Man rowing barebacked wooden furniture Like the real life bicker of true love.

e daring wink in the opulent, tragic “What the Whales Sound Like in Manhattan”:

It is a sound that catches on the canopies of pre-war highrise buildings designed to keep out light & Latin music & the seeds of Chinese children

eating kiwis on these handsome summer nights. It is a sound that tips the gryphons on the tops of buildings, one that spreads the concrete wings

of gargoyles clutched to rooftops looking out for seasons. In Manhattan it is not that common to have whales.

e confounding but hilarious aside in the ominous, otherworldly rst poem in the collection, “Domestic Mysticism”:

When I come home, the dwarves will be long In their shadows & promiscuous. e alley cats will sneak Inside, curl about the legs of furniture, close the skins Inside their eyelids, sleep. Orchids will be intercrossed & sturdy. e sun will go down as I sit, thin armed, small breasted In my cotton dress, poked with eyelet stitches, a little lace, In the queer light left when a room snu s out.

I draw a bath, enter the water as a god enters water: Fertile, knowing, kind, surrounded by glass objects Which could break easily if mishandled or ill-touched. Everyone knows an unworshipped woman will betray you.

Overall, it was the extravagant and inevitable-feeling tragedy that drew me to the poems, the four-and-a-half pages spent in the precocious head of “Jessica, from the Well,” the extreme dysfunction of twin sisters who lose touch with reality and edge toward violence in “Elective Mutes,” the vague “you” who evokes an economically and emotionally lost Midwest in “Ohio & Beyond.” Lucie could deploy the ampersand and the mid-sentence capital letter with an authority I still can’t muster myself; when I try either,

the e ort looks amateur. I took A Hunger with me when I went home on breaks. I kept consulting it for years afterward, whenever life was cruel and inexplicable.

Lucie did not collect written comments from peer to peer but trusted students to give them to each other, and for the most part, everyone did. At the end of the term, Lucie told me that I would, in the course of my writing life, “be criticized by people who can’t see the orchestration beneath the coolness of the poems’ surfaces.” As I think she did for everyone, she gave me a handwritten letter in response to my portfolio at the end of the term. Over the years I have read and reread this letter, loving the distinctive, loopy handwriting that had skated all over my drafts, usually in three colors. e letter gave me the strength to persist in the face of the routine rejection that all but the most blessed of writers face.

Some excerpts:

I am certain, long since, that you are the Real Item. I’ve got this Faith (I’ve got this mystic streak in me . . . ). More & more, week by week, I am convinced of this . . . It is my business to encourage, enlighten, entertain, support — but I am not Merely encouraging you. I mean more than that. I know your Gift. It’s real & Genetic & true . . . Here’s the thing: I am, as you know, drawn often to the garish . . . the risky, the Bold, the Audacious, the long-winded, the High-winded. Drawn to that. And what delights me most about your work is how enormously coolblooded it is. Sometimes, nearly Bloodless. And so it shocks & astounds me! at these qualities of near-tepid detachment, of near-compulsive tightness, of lukewarmness in the poems draws (& gives o ) such heat. Small miracle? is is the gift. . . . Get thee to a Nunnery. Get thee to a Garrett.

Because she did not collect the written comments, she had no way of knowing that I was already receiving, on occasion, the criticism she warned about, although some classmates must surely have vocalized them in workshop. ere was praise, but someone called my use of form “oppressive” and urged me to abandon it; another said the poems had no emotion and could I add some? is is indeed the risk of imposing a lot of discipline on a poem: withhold a hair too much, and rather than concentrating a feeling, you end up obscuring it. But if it was coming through to Lucie, maybe I was on to something.

For a couple of years after graduation, I wrote letters to Lucie, sent poems, and sometimes called. I had moved to New York, where I loved the racial and linguistic diversity and unlimited literary events, but where I spent my days in a cubicle, had about $10 per week from my paycheck to spend on something other than necessities, and could not nd community; outside poetry, I was miserable. She called and wrote back, although she warned on a cat postcard I still have: “Forgive me for not writing back always & quickly – but know I think of you, reading your letters with pleasure. Don’t let New York drive you mad – it wd. me. is is why I live here in the beauty of the Provinces.” When I made my rst application to the Fine Arts Work Center, Lucie warned that my age, which would have been 22 or 23, was going to work against me; she had gone at 24 and found herself the youngest person there. Indeed, the Work Center describes itself as a place for emerging artists who have nished their formal training, and I had not yet been to graduate school. I was impatient, although not nearly as impatient as Lucie, who had been declared “audacious” by an early teacher, to whom she had submitted an 83-page poem. Another of her teachers, Charles Wright, who would also become my teacher, told me he wasn’t sure he had “taught” Lucie anything: she had, he said, come to uva already on her own self-made trajectory. I called her when the Work Center’s rejection letter arrived with a handwritten sentence at the bottom: “ e Committee admired your work.” Without hesitation, Lucie said, “ at means they are going to accept you later,” which ensured that I would keep applying. Plus, now that I have served on that selection committee, I know how rare such a note is; she was not “merely encouraging” me but speaking on authority.

I don’t know how she managed to stay in touch, because there were so many of us, more every year, and while not everyone intended to become a poet, the a ection seemed universal. On the last day of our workshop, when the students sat silently lling out course evaluation forms with Lucie out of the room, someone had broken the silence with the remark, “How can we ll these things out? It’s like critiquing your own mother,” and that same withheld laughter—as after the comma question— lled the room. at habit of withholding, then letting go, was a behavior she had cultivated in us; she projected formality in class, then broke it with an outrageous, hilarious remark—and this too was a lesson in writing well.

I don’t love going to Target, but sometimes it’s the best place to shop, for those days when you would otherwise have to go to four separate stores, needing, say, a shower curtain, a workout top, a pen re ll, and a lemon. Not much of a poet when it comes to ca eine, I bypass the Starbucks. But since Lucie’s untimely death, Target—this Target—has taken on a certain sanctity for me. I think of Lucie as the automatic doors open to let me in, and again to let me out. I wonder where in the huge parking lot we packed her loot for its journey to the legendary apartment in New York, where her Columbia students were lucky enough to meet for workshops. I think of her negotiating the “real world” of tollbooths and dentists, that world she renounced as fully as possible to spend her life in poetry, and she seems— especially under the spell of her poems—a person loaned to us from another universe. I think of her Victorian-clad radiance every week in that class nearly 30 years ago and her graciousness in later coming to Dickinson for what must have been much less than her normal honorarium, as a kindness to me. I remember the day she came to workshop and complained that a boot had been put on her car; she was occupied with higher things than when to move the car, trivia that clutters the heads of us commoners, and literature is the better for it. I think with gratitude of that reception in 1988: what would my life look like if I, or she, hadn’t attended? And I hear in my head certain passages from that book I carried around like a talisman in the

early years and nally thought to have autographed in 2006, in case it would be a long time until we met again:

If I have something important to say I hope I live here long enough To say it gracefully. e wind moves Everything. Nothing is exempt.

—from “Magnum Mysterium”

Now you’re gone too & that’s one more Of us who won’t go ragging into old age. —from “A Little Piece of Everlasting Life”

e earth opens for me as I always knew it would for a wish. —from “Jessica, from the Well”

Reading the newly translated Waning of the Middle Ages hit me like sudden death—not so much the dying part, as the instant review of a long life. Reabsorbing the antic contents of Huizinga’ s history (now entitled Autumntide) sparked a version of the search-and-recover expedition harkened by the sled called Rosebud, and the French cookie, Madeleine. e Dutchman’s freewheeling account of 14th and 15thcentury France and the Low Countries, now richly seeded with full-color illuminations, rang bell after bell, until I realized that it was the key to almost every chapter of my own life.

How could that be?

It began nearly half a century ago, upon the purchase of e Waning of the Middle Ages, a yellow paperback, picked up probably at the Harvard Coop, in an e ort to ground my senior project deciphering e Garden of Earthly Delights, Hieronymus Bosch’s infamous painting, whose fever-dream agonies and ecstasies papered many a dormitory wall. I was then a student in Social Relations, a department now deleted from the catalogue, but I was already halfway out the door, tiring of the likes of the turgid Talcott Parsons, the wild omas Szasz, and the witty David Reisman, and the possibility of edging toward greener pastures opened up in a single course, Fine Arts 13, Harvard’s year-long survey of art. And I had the brass—or maybe just the foolishness—to think that I could master the swarming history of the 14th and 15th centuries in a few months: and, in those countries whose borders were uid, culture and politics devilishly complex, and where I had none of the historical background, and only one of the languages. If that weren’t brazen enough for a 21-year-old dilettante, then I’d add to the task a sweeping socio-psychological diagnosis of the artist and his times.

And for the cherry on top, my rst chapter was rendered in dramatic form, setting some of the characters: Philip the Bold, Philip the Good, Philip the Fair, along with Mary of Flanders, Mary of Burgundy, Mary of York—not to mention Charles the Bold and John the Fearless—as actors

in a talk fest, imagined and staged by me. When—truth be told—I could hardly keep them straight and separate from each other.

Do I need to say that—in the eyes of my three or four faculty examiners—my opus fell sublimely at? ese were the days when Freud was no longer on the collegiate menu, so I hadn’t taken a single course, nor read a word. e rst question at my thesis defense was what the father of psychoanalysis would have thought of HB. I oundered and fumbled, sitting before my inquisitors in the penthouse of William James Hall. How could I possibly know what Freud would have thought?

Shame haunted me for years after this asco. I remember lying on the oor of my attic dorm room, wondering how I could go on living, let alone deposit the wreckage of this thesis in the library, a requirement for the degree.

But, to my delight and astonishment, I have discovered—only half a century later—that Huizinga shares the blame for the collegiate debacle. He started it, with an account too brilliant, too confusing, too distracting, spiced with quotes from nutty clerics, poets, inquisitors, saints, and martyrs. He himself was burdened with too much reading—and too much imagination—to mount a clear structure for his opus. And now I know. I’m not saying his masterpiece reads like my thesis, but that its swarming, spinning, recycling, and all-too-expressionistic methods gave me license to forgo logic, coherence, factual reliability, you name it. I felt invited to do my thing, and sure enough, during my trial, one of the triune judges, who settled on my grade of “no distinction,” quipped that, perhaps, I was better o becoming a novelist. Although prophetic, that remark salved no wounds. I wore the dishonor like a coat of arms, a blazon, a device, proverb, motto for the minimum of a decade, but probably more like two.

Not knowing, then, of course, that I would spend the rest of my life atoning for this school-day disaster. I haven’t become a historian, and I still have no sense of time: clock, diurnal, annual, era. But I now understand a few things. Why e Waning was so important to me, as—even to me at that time—it read like a kind of life story: my own.

Johan Huizinga (1872–1945) was a Dutch polymath, an intellectual giant, and one of a kind, “competent not only in Dutch, French, and German, but in Middle Dutch, Middle French, High Middle German, and Latin,” as Diane Webb, his new translator, writes, warning translators and proofreaders of potential potholes. e original Herfsttij der Middeleeuwen hit the stands in 1919, and was translated into English in 1924. e subtitle, not always included, is A Study of Forms of Life and ought of the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Centuries in France and the Low Countries. Huizinga’s mission as a historian was to “allow minds of his own days to experience life in earlier times.” I’m grati ed now to note that his aim was not unlike that of a novelist.

Autumntide, the product of ten years’ labor, was Huizinga’s magnum opus, an attempt to set things straight with regard to two centuries that were too often slighted as the sad, deluded, and hapless route to the Italian Renaissance. He struggled with the title, as he clearly didn’t see the Late Middle Ages in Northern Europe as a decline. As coeditor Graeme Small writes, “ e term Autumntide suggests both a turning point and a whole season,” denoting a “fully developed culture”—what Huizinga himself termed “a tree with overripe fruit.” e book was a sensation, immediately translated into languages European, Middle Eastern, and Asian. It was reprinted dozens of times, had ve separate editions in Dutch, English, French, German, Italian, Swedish, and Hungarian. e text, compacted in its rst English translation, was fully eshed out in its original Dutch, and in this latest English translation. e original had a handful of blackand-white illustrations, whereas Autumntide is a magni cent co ee-table book with hundreds of brilliant color prints. It comes complete with just the thing that the young Harvard student needed: a timeline, a genealogy, an epilogue, notes, bibliography—the whole apparatus of a scholarly tome, missing, alas, in its earlier English version. And yet, even in its full, footnoted dress, the history retains its intimate, vivid, and wayward charm. e very things I liked in 1970 are still there in the 600-page, doorstopper of this, the 2019 centennial edition. e editor also indicates why I might have been led astray by Huizinga’s peculiar approach. “ e work self-consciously eschews the

framework of political history.” It a ords “an empathic understanding” of the past, largely shaped by the art of the time. “Until very recently,” the editor concludes, “few would have dared to claim that [the history] followed any sort of method at all.”

Yes! And, “ e order in which Huizinga set out his ndings may not be immediately obvious to the reader.” Do I feel vindicated? Not exactly, more like sweetly grati ed by this late-life reckoning with the Dutch genius who set my life in motion.

In what way? My second book, loosely organized around a tale of those brief Harvard years, was arrayed like a medieval hour book, with prose poems suggesting pictorial illuminations. Its title, e Very Rich Hours was a chip from the Limburg Brothers masterpiece, Les très riches heures du Duc de Berry. But, it was much later, and around the time of the writing of book ve, that the buried-but-not-lost Waning resurged. I had wholly forgotten that the prompt for and crowning glory of e Waning were the paintings of Jan van Eyck. ese paintings served as the fulcrum of Huizinga’s odd argument that the Late Middle Ages were and were not the foundation of the Italian Renaissance. Yes, but also no. e Late Middle Ages were a thing in and of themselves, a forerunner to, but also totally lacking in, Renaissance spirit. is is the kind of paradox that unsettled the college student, whose recent life experience had dislodged—if not exploded—a childhood of devout Catholicism, but also did not dislodge and explode it— just displaced it, driving it underground. Huizinga’s dilemma: what the Late Middle Ages were and were not, was familiar to me: were and were not.

Professor Small speaks to the dilemma’s horns:

[T]he art of Van Eyck and his contemporaries, apparently so modern, was actually shaped by the very same forms of thought that can be traced in all the enervated poetry, religious thought and conduct of the age. Secondly, those very same forms can also be discerned in the Italian art and literature of the quattrocento. Burckhardt’s Italy was not so modern after all. Our concept of periodization—a fundamental issue in general. history—was in need of a revision.

But would Huizinga’s “revision” answer the question of why the two periods are so obviously separate and distinct? Or even why we need them to be so separate and distinct? Yes, but also no.

Johan Huizinga was a very good writer. Even his chapter titles are inviting or provocative—or both. e history opens with “Life’s Fierceness,” depicting the public attraction of gruesome executions, and the spellbinding sermons by itinerant preachers on the Four Last ings: death, judgment, heaven, and hell. One Friar Richard, confessor to Joan of Arc, “preached for ten consecutive days in Paris in 1429. He began at ve in the morning and nished between ten and eleven . . . standing with his back to the open charnel houses, in which the skulls were piled up in in full view.” Who came? “Six thousand strong according to the anonymous Bourgeois of Paris, “they troop out of town on Saturday night to assure themselves of a good place and spend the night in the open.” e nale to the Middle Ages was, in short, a “stupefying heydey of painful justice and judicial cruelty,”whose striking quality was not “morbid perversity but the beastly, dull-witted delight that common folk took in it— its fun-fair gaiety.”

In “ e Yearning for a Finer Life,” Chapter Two, Huizinga begins to unfold, in bold contrast to the hangings and cruci xions, the niceties of court life. “ e hierarchical arrangements,” he writes, “of the court hierarchy are succulently Pantagruelian,” its services “regulated with almost liturgical dignity, of pantlers and carvers and cupbearers and masters of the kitchen—was like the performance of a great and serious stage play.” If the history does nothing else, it serves a marvelous appetizer to the plays of Shakespeare, many of which draw their stories from these courts and this period.

From this prologue, Huizinga launches into a long examination of courtliness, knightliness, and chivalry, as these ideals and prescriptions schooled the upper class in their relations to each other, to the monarch, and to God, reaching deep into statecraft and warfare, until these ideals arrive in their perfect and natural home: literature.

“Everywhere,” Huizinga writes, “the lie leaks through the chinks in the full knightly armour. Reality constantly negates the ideal. is is why it retreats more and more into the sphere of literature, celebration and play: there and there alone could the illusion of the ne chivalric life be maintained; only there was one among kindred spirits in the only caste where all these sentiments have validity.” (Until Cervantes comes along to make fun of it all.) e Romance of the Rose, with its two authors, is the literary highlight of the era, wedding the courtly and religious ideals with the bestial. “ e entire epithalamic apparatus, with its shameless laugh and phallic symbolism had once been part of the sacred rites belonging to the solemnization of the nuptials. en the church came along,” Huizinga writes, “and claimed the sanctity and mystery for itself, by transferring them to the sacrament of holy matrimony.”

By the time I was a child, in the very last and latest segment of the Middle Ages, the “epithalamic apparatus” had only one side: the sacrament. It was clear from everything preached from the pulpit, or drummed into us at Blessed Sacrament School, that the highest callings were to the clergy and the convent, and that marriage was a lowly—if necessary—third. We were taught that the nuns were married to Jesus (some wore wedding rings), and that the church was our mother, and the marriage “act” there solely for the production of new Catholics. Birth control consisted of the so-called rhythm method, even though the pill was available. Calculated contraception was, of course, a mortal sin. e word abortion wasn’t in our lexicon. “Expecting” was the term for pregnancy; “lying in,” for labor and delivery. Sins against the sixth commandment were front and forward in the sermons preached during our all-girls retreats, housed in a convent—otherwise, sex was never mentioned by name.

But all of this is old news; what was truly shocking to this writer was to be found in two middle chapters of Autumntide: “ e Image of Death” followed by “ e Presentation of All ings Holy.”

“No era has constantly inculcated the idea of death into the collective mind as forcefully as the fteenth century” . . . and into the minds of 1950s Providence, I might add. A new invention, printmaking in the form of

woodblocks, contributed to the e orts of mendicant preachers to “render the idea of death only in a very simple, direct and lively image—sharp and erce.” e end game had two features: the elegiac, “What is left of all that human beauty and glory? Memories, a name.” But, “the sadness of that thought is not enough,” Huizinga adds, “to satisfy the need to be acutely horri ed by death. So the times held up a mirror to a more visible horror, transience in the short term: the rotting of the corpse,” and to be precise, “terrifyingly varied depictions of the naked corpse, rotting or shriveled, with contorted hands and feet and gaping mouth, with worms writhing in its bowels.”

“Remember, man,” we heard in church—and elsewhere—“that thou art dust, and to dust thou will return.” As children, we went to wakes, and stepped up before the open casket, to kneel down, and look into the pale and still face, and at the carefully folded hands (usually twined around the beads of a rosary). During Holy Week, the time from Palm to Easter Sundays, passing through Shrove Tuesday, Spy Wednesday, Maundy ursday, Good Friday, and Holy Saturday, we were told to meditate on the ve wounds of the cruci ed Christ, one by one. After ursday’s ceremonials and washing of the feet, we witnessed the theatrical stripping of the altar of sacred host, candles, and ornament, and draping of all the statues in black or purple shrouds. On Friday and Saturday, instead of the altar bells, sacred moments were marked by the dismal clapping of wood blocks. e priests, often three of them clad in black, prostrated on the altar steps, face down. On Good Friday, the “Holy Joes,” and I was one, knelt for three hours to mark the time Jesus hung on the cross, then knelt some more for the liturgical dirges and lamentations that followed.

“ ere is,” Huizinga remarks in Chapter 12, “an unbridled need to visualize all things holy, to give every conception of a religious nature a distinct form so that it imprints itself on the brain like a sharp engraving.” To assist the visualization was “the rampant rise in the number of vigils, prayers, fasts, abstinences.” To me, six centuries later, all this ceremony was very exciting, injecting into the drab everyday a dose of spice. ere was a year, the Marian year, dedicated to Mary, and Catholic girls born then were not only called Mary, but were asked to dress only in the colors of the

Madonna: blue and white. On the feast of St. Blaise, crisscrossed candles were pressed against our throats as a sign and promise that the saint would protect us from su ocation. A St. Christopher medal hung on the rearview car mirror to save us from accidents, just as he had carried the Christ Child safely across the waters. We wore cloth scapulars, so that when we died, we wouldn’t serve a long sentence in Purgatory. We pinned miraculous medals (with a stamped image of the Blessed Virgin) on our blouses. Every morning we o ered up “the trials and joys of our school days” to absolve some portion of our sins and their residue. We were told to “o er up” any pain, illness, or disappointment to God, for the salvation of souls, including our own. Release from our term in Purgatory, that limbic zone, was purchased through frequent vocalization of short appeals, ‘ejaculations,’ such as “Lord have mercy” or “Jesus, Mary, and Joseph, ” which were readily converted to pungent (“God damn it, Isabel!”) curses. Some of these ejaculations were valued at 30 days, some more. Numbers were important. Church bells rang three times a day for recitation of the Angelus. ere were seven sacraments, seven deadly sins, eight corporal and eight spiritual works of mercy, eight holy days of obligation, nine days for a novena. . . .

I laughed when I read that a 15th-century divine lamented that “few people go to Mass on holy days. ey do not listen until the end and content themselves with quickly touching the holy water, saluting Our Blessed Lady with a genu ection, or kissing the statue of a saint.” Likewise, men in our parish preferred, during mass, to stand in the back of the church, even after the pastor (“Siddown!”) called them out. As young girls, a friend and I liked to visit the statue of the Little Flower, St. érèse of Lisieux, and plant nger-kisses on her plaster roses. I don’t think, though, we assumed we collected extra points for doing so. We knew this was unsanctioned.

In a chapter entitled “Types of Religious Life,” Huizinga begins to experiment with his far-reaching theories. While marking the cultural divide between north (the northern Netherlands) and south (France and lower Netherlands), he describes the former as strictly severing “pietistic circles” from worldly life, whereas lower down on the map, “lofty devotion remained part of general religious life,” concluding with the bold assertion that this

di erence “still distinguishes Latin people from Northern peoples: the former take contradictions less seriously, feel less strongly the need to draw the logical conclusion, can more easily combine the often cynical attitude of everyday life with the high rapture of the blessed moment.”

What might sound like a mild form of eugenics was a view widely shared in my parish, where the south (Italian Americans from Sicily and Naples), were known to pay only their Easter duty, skipping Sunday mass (and accruing 51 mortal sins for doing so), contrasted with the Irish Holy Joes of potato-famine provenance, who trekked dutifully to church on Sundays, the holy days of obligation, and every day of the week, if they could.

Addressing what he reads as “barbaric ascesis,” Huizinga describes extremes of piety, unknown even in my neighborhood. One of the holy mendicants King Louis IX beckons to attend him on his deathbed is known to “ ee if he sees women . . . has never touched a coin . . . usually sleeps standing or leaning . . . never cuts his hair or beard . . . never eats food of animal origin, and accepts only root vegetables.” Annual vacations in rural Brittany gave tangible proof that this was no exaggeration. Certain of the one-room cottages with ve-feet- thick walls still contained tall cabinets—built in or freestanding—that served as beds, so that married couples, in the interests of purity, chastity, modesty, and diabolic temptation, could safely sleep standing up.

Huizinga delights in these extremes of ascesis, forever coupled with crude materialism, devoting a chapter to how 14th and 15th-century folks managed to tie every aspect of daily life together, all radiating from the deity. Once God himself was visualized, “everything that emanated from him . . . had to solidify or crystallize into formulated thoughts. And thus originate that grand and noble image of the world as one big symbolic nexus, a cathedral of ideas. . . .”

He nds his example in the walnut as a foliate symbol of Christ: “the sweet kernel is his divine nature, the eshy outer skin his humanity, and the wooden shell between them is the cross.” e latter half of Autumntide is devoted to a closely reasoned argument for why art of the Late Middle Ages was more revealing, closer to the truth,

and aesthetically superior to all forms of writing, except maybe sermons and satires, which managed to elude eschatological strictures.

He begins his argument by detailing the strictures:

Art from the end of the Middle Ages faithfully re ects the spirit of the end of the Middle Ages, a spirit that had reached the end of its path . . . the portrayal of all conceivable things taken to their logical conclusions, the over lling of the mind with an in nite system of formal representations: this, too, is the essence of the art of the age. It, too, strives to leave nothing unformed, nothing undepicted or unembellished.” Later, he opines that an “art dominated by that horror vacui may perhaps be called a characteristic of spiritual eras nearing their end.

His second step is to show how the all-inclusive mode served painting far better than poetry.

“If a painter con nes himself to the simple depiction of an external reality in line and color,” he writes, “then he inevitably imbues that purely formal imitation with a surfeit of things unspoken and ine able. But if a poet aims no higher than to express in words a visible or previously pondered reality,” he loses “the treasure of the unspoken.”

Boiled down, what this means is that painters could ful ll the need to be observant and doctrinally correct by reverent treatment of the religious scene at the picture’s center—Mary and her baby, the cruci xion, adoration of the magi, etc.—but were free in the borders to depict extraneous things—things outside of the church’s jurisdiction: bluish castles rising up in the distance, a few round-tufted trees, and stone outcrops, all taken from life. Jan van Eyck is seen by Huizinga as the best the age could produce. In his few extant portraits, he plumbs “personality to its depths.” In the double portrait Giovanni Arnol ni and his Wife, Huizinga sees much to admire in the free handling of facial expressions and articles of furniture, but other scholars have ascribed every feature in this painting to its proper source in Christian iconography. Not much of a margin for freelancing.

When I had completed the manuscript for Above It All, my third novel, I took my mother to Belgium—to Bruges and Ghent, to have a look at the paintings to be found in Jan van Eyck’ s home turf. I had seen the Annunciation in the National Gallery, and had glimpsed some portraits in the Gemäldegalerie in Berlin, but key works were still to be found in what was formerly the Kingdom of Burgundy. What was the motive for situating this particular artist front and center in my novel? I had long forgotten e Waning of the Middle Ages, and even the thesis crisis had faded from mind. Until just now reading Autumnide, I did not recall the centrality of Jan van Eyck in Huizinga’s great work.

Did I write this book in homage to Huizinga? No, but I can’t deny the book’s lingering in uence. When I researched hour books after nishing this novel, and was given, as a Christmas present, a boxed edition of Les très riches heures du Duc de Berry, I turned to the two volumes of Panofsky’s Early Netherlandish Painting, and read those again when working on the van Eyck book. Never, though—until now—did I see that the source for this lifelong obsession with the art of the Late Middle Ages, was that crucial collision as a college senior with e Waning.

Huizinga devotes his last chapter, “ e Coming of New Forms,” to the transition from Late Middle Ages to Early Renaissance, but it’s clear his heart lies in the Franco-Burgundian world of the 15th century, a world whose major keynote is one of “gloom, barbaric splendor, bizarre and overloaded forms, threadbare fantasy. . . . ” By the 15th century, of course, the Italian Renaissance was well begun, and northern Europe had borrowed and adopted something of this cultural rebirth, familiarizing itself with the literature and art of ancient Greece and Rome, but only as “antique traits,” “ludicrous latinization,” delving no deeper than the trimmings. “ e French spirit of the fteenth century still wears the Renaissance like an ill- tting garment,” he concludes. e Renaissance, in short, never arrives?

Oh, but yes it does. In the last sentence of Autumntide, Huizinga celebrates the possibility (and ingredients) of full arrival at rebirth. “ e Renaissance comes,” he writes, “only when the tone of life changes, when the tide of the mortifying renunciation of life turns, and a fresh, gusty wind arises, when the happy awareness ripens that all the glory of antiquity, which served for so long as a mirror, could be regained.”

For this writer, Autumntide remains a marvelous book—truly a book of marvels, whose author was thrilled by the weirdness, perversity, fervor, credulousness, etc. of the time, its people and productions. is story and how he tells it had a lasting grip on my imagination that no number of trips to Florence and sightings of Michelangelo and Donatello, along with the multiple readings of Burckhardt on the Renaissance, could match. It is probably the reason I took so to the works of John Ruskin with his clear bias in favor of the Romanesque and the Gothic, and his disdain, if not disgust, with the classical revival in Italy, and sequelae. at rebirth in architecture and art was, in his eyes, a retrograde production of stale vulgarity, compared to what came just before.

When I saw that e Waning of the Middle Ages, long forgotten by me, was returning to the shelves in this new, colorful dress, I knew I was in for a treat, but I couldn’t have foreseen the shock I would feel at every page, grasping how deeply this book had touched almost every era of my life as a writer.

One of the wonderful—and discouraging—things about poetry anthologies is that they’re almost compulsory; they scream “required reading,” and they often are. One could imagine a compendium of great anthologies, from Tottel’s Miscellany to Pound’s collation of the Troubadours and James Weldon Johnson’s Book of American Negro Poetry. e curatorial impulse haunts poets and poetry—since more than a couple dozen poems t in the space of a book, more and more books exist to house the memorable ones.

In their FSG Poetry Anthology, Farrar, Strauss, and (inevitably) Giroux have supplied, through editors Jonathan Galassi and Robyn Creswell, possibly the best anthology in recent memory. Not that they had much choice; FSG arrived and came to ascendancy concurrent with the professionalization of poetry during the 20th century’s fat American middle. So the rst of this collection’s many names are the aging moderns Eliot and (Allen) Tate and their great students, direct or not, Lowell, Bishop, Jarrell, and Robert Giroux’s Philolexian cohort John Berryman; his 22nd Dream Song, “of 1826,” in reference to the near-simultaneous deaths of John Adams and omas Je erson on the Fourth of July, opens this collection. More than the soft indignity of “teenage cancer” and the self-consciously suburban Hopkinsisme of “I am the auto salesman and lóve you,” this poem presents an historical imperative:

It is the Fourth of July. Collect: while the dying man, forgone by you creator, who forgives, is gasping ‘ omas Je erson still lives’ in vain, in vain, in vain. I am Henry Pussy-cat! My whiskers y.

Perfectly burlesque—a poet-pussy cat on the hunt for material, but more omnivorous. Which works as a good enough substitute for this book’s mission.

But one tries, against hope, to live for the present. While our poets— new, formal, or not—have largely emerged from their little trenches to rally together against their craft’s present and for-now-ebbing obscurity, missing the dark woods for the trees. is isn’t to say there’s nothing written now worth reading; there’s enough and much of it from FSG. Ask where this hemisphere’s poetry lives today, and I’ll show you Ishion Hutchinson’s dowse and soot-haunted seascapes:

. . . drift-pocked, solitary ducks across the bay’s industrial ruts, their stark white shapes moving like phantoms in the marsh, somewhere outside New Jersey.

Or Ange Mlinko’s tin miniatures:

Rotted frames, rusted nails, show their age: the peeling backs, the glass glued now to them like glass-topped co ns . . . the water damage (my fault) that looks like ectoplasm

which live in Karen Solie’s derelict (North) Americas:

Unequivocal through Carolinian forests which have not wholly disappeared, and equally among rows of wrecked cars in the junkyards, hoods open like a choir?

Or Lawrence Joseph’s metaphysical cities:

So you will be, perhaps appropriately, dismissed for it, a morality of seeing, laying it on. Who among the idealists won’t sit in the private domain, exchange culture with the moneymakers?

Far from being comprehensive—or even much of a survey— this anthology speaks for a cosmopolitan attitude recurrent, but not predominant, in American poetry. But anthologies exist to o er the diachronic view beside the synchronic, and the best thing about this book, its real curatorial genius, is in its translations, which constitute a little under a fth of the book’s pages. e sheer sweep of them alone, from Ashbery’s thunderous Max Jacob to Maria Dahvana Headley’s new Grendel-asCandyman Beowulf, which is just as fun as one dares to imagine:

. . . Be it wizened vizier or beardless boy, he hunted them across foggy moors, an owl mist-diving for mice, grist-grinding their tails in his teeth. A hellion’s home is anywhere good men fear to tread.

Remember Larkin’s admonishment about “foreign” poetry (“If that glass thing over there is a window, then it isn’t a fenster or a fenêtre or whatever”) and that Beowulf had to come to Britain—now to America—to furnish a written language, and that its translators are translating, as it were, from English. e collection speaks for translation’s place at the crosshatched center of American poetry—an unapologetically New York way of seeing things. Robert Giroux found the necessary aggregate—logroller, sometime money-spinner—in Robert Lowell himself, whose presence infects these poems, especially the many translations. With signi cant, mostly Soviet, exceptions—Joseph Brodsky, Valzhyna Mort, Charles Simic—American poets are mostly de ned in and by one language, as our graduate programs are, or de ned by a particularly American derring-do, like “battling” cancer or the extra point kick in (American) football. Galassi, one of this country’s most intelligent translators, manages to sneak in a few of his own rich and careful treatments of Montale—who’s been his life’s achievement:

So much time has passed yet nothing’s happened since I sang you “Tu che fai l’addormentata” on the phone, gu awing madly. Your house was a ash of lightning from the train,

leaning over the Arno like the Judas tree that tried to protect it.

e editors risk a troubling American naïveté about English—that translation is a bilateral e ort between the source language and the translator’s target language and universalizes rather than arrogates its object language into a “third code.” ankfully, the selected translators prove more often open to the gritty, idiolectic, sometimes cartoonish (mist-diving, grist-grinding) necessities of interested translation and help tongue the anthology’s grooves. As Creswell and Galassi outline in their introduction:

We have aimed to single out poems that come alive as objects on their own, even as they rhyme—often at a slant—with other pieces in the anthology. ere are greatest hits here, but more frequently we’ve tried to select work that is perhaps less familiar yet nevertheless characteristic of the writer: renewed discoveries to hold up to the light again.

One particularly compelling section comes just before the book’s middle, when the bronze “elegance” of Lorca’s “Andalusian . . . olive trees”—trans. Christopher Mauer—catches int on Christopher Logue’s Iliad on the other end of the Mediterranean: “Fender their sca old pike-heads into Greece.” at exquisite verb, “fender,” ickers in Heaney’s Beowulf: “So the king of the Geats / raised his hand and struck hard / at the enamelled scales.” en the inverse of enamel—soft, gummy rubber—in Eliza Griswold’s “single ip- op grac[ing] the hardpacked oor.” Footsteps again in Michael Hofmann’s Durs Grünbein. “Incessant rain has softened the tracks, the woods are one long ambush, / and the barbarians in packs, the wolves, / bite pieces out of our rear guard.” en, decisively, “I walk the rainbow in the dark” from Frederick Seidel. And nally, another refraction prism though Lowell vis Montale: “this life / for everyone no longer possessed with our breath— / and how the sapphire last light is born again for men who live down here; / it is too sad such peace can only enlighten us by glints, / as everything falls back with a rare ash on steaming sidestreets.”

ings aren’t always this easy—certain acquisitions tilt the scales a bit. Again, from the introduction: “ e poems are designated by the date of their rst publication on the fsg list, which occasionally makes for unexpected juxtapositions.” ere’s something weirdly compelling about Delmore Schwartz’s sneaking up on A. E. Stallings in the book’s home stretch. But they go on: “Above all, we hope this book is fun—full of surprises and delights that will lead the reader back to the wealth of extraordinary voices who have helped make fsg the house it is.” is is honest, as far as advertising goes, and brings to mind Lowell’s “Scream”: “you don’t have to love everyone, / your heart won’t let you!” But you can read them yet in this book, for fun if not always from love.

Requeening, by Amanda Moore (Ecco, 2021), 112 pp.

In Requeening, the 2020 National Poetry Series winner selected by Ocean Vuong, Amanda Moore uses the metaphor of the hive to examine the work we each must do to build, and rebuild, a life. A domestic hive is its own entity, humming with hidden, internal energies, yet it requires keeping—a steady, attuned involvement in the smooth running of its a airs. Requeening is thus a timely and fascinating tutorial in seeking a right balance between freedom and care. In the melodic rst sentence of “Afterswarm,” this balance is o :

As for when my rst bees knit themselves together in a single sovereign self and slunk over the fence in search of a truant queen, I couldn’t say— not with my own house to mind.

e stakes of such distraction in the handling of a hive—or a life—are mortally high, and the poem’s speaker learns her lesson, vowing in the nal stanza, “I will be alive this time / to what swells and roils the colony. . . . I will heed.” In poem after poem, this is what the speaker does. And while it does not frame every poem in the collection, the hive as both object and emblem allows Requeening to be both grounded in embodied experience and at the same time on the wing through ideas of labor and responsibility, resistance and relationship, making and grieving.

Requeening moves uidly through a variety of forms (predominantly free verse but including sonnets, haibun, lists, as well as a palinode, an elegy, an essay, and a postcard). Despite deft tonal shifts, the poems maintain focus, pointing to hives—and by extension to hearts, houses, bodies, relationships, and, of course, poems—as working containers. (It’s no coincidence that Moore is a careful reader of Philip Levine.) Moore’s speaker locates her “own begetting” in “the exhalations and plumes / of midwestern work.” Her daughter’s dreams are “work that can’t be done in the waking world.” Speaking both of spring and new grief in “Next Lines,” she rmly states, “it’s time / to help the season work its magic.” In “ e Worker,” a splendid

poem, a bee portrays its toil in and for the hive in words that could describe a healthy poem:

Each cell tidy and tight with brood, what’s mine now is sunshine and breeze

a gyre of pleasure and labor within.

And while work in Requeening is fundamentally generative, it is not always pleasant or pretty. In “ e Dead ing” the speaker enjoins, “you house ies / and scavengers, you insects, mites, beetles, larva, / maggots and worms: do your work.”

Above all, in Requeening it is our human bodies that do the work of experiencing and of surviving experience. “Don’t talk to me of a god: / it’s not what saved me,” we are instructed in the Whitmanesque “Gratitude,” “I thank nothing / but my body / for this life.” As hive-like containers of life and their own source of deep knowing, bodies get respect in Requeening. Typical in its sharp-witted treatment of a lowly topic, “Haibun with Norovirus” demonstrates that a body’s work can even be funny, gross, and admirable all at once:

Just as I became accustomed to her new independence, the privacy, her one-word answers, the girl croaks “Mom!” early one morning from behind the bathroom door and I come to nd her clinging to the lip of the toilet discharging a vomit so red and bright and brilliant it can’t have been made by the body, and I remembered the way, just before bed the night before and against my objections, she had upturned a bag of XXtra Flamin’ Hot Cheetos in her mouth. is vomiting is more than mere consequence, I can see, as her body works to purge itself entirely, throwing her head forward again and again.

At the end of “Calendula,” a gorgeous poem that visually links the orange ower, rings of re, the sun, and her body during childbirth, the speaker remembers both matter-of-factly and in wonderment, “How I worked to open.” In the context of the larger collection, this simple sentence is exhilarating. It portrays the work women do with their bodies not as just an involuntary e ect of mindless biological processes, but as deliberate, e ortful, and skilled. e sentence also captures the way love, fear, and grief, felt in and by the body, can open us to experience more deeply than the protective human ego allows.

“Self-Defense Haibun” is another instance of such opening. Its short sentences arrive with battering speed as the speaker’s teen daughter is brought down and pinned all too realistically by a teacher-assailant before she begins to ght back and ends by repeatedly slamming his (padded) head to the mat, yelling “NO!” One of seven haibun that track the shifting dynamics of the mother-daughter relationship, this poem in particular demonstrates the necessity of the form; it is with visceral relief that we, along with the near-sobbing speaker, take refuge in the controlled summary of its concluding haiku:

Poison berry, potential weapon: within women a latent violence.

It is not mere violence that fear has unlocked, though; like angry guard bees, her daughter’s good anger at being violated has released the energy required to claim her existence, whole and entire, in the world. “When the thumb of fear lifts, we are so alive,” notes Mary Oliver at the end of her poem “May,” and fear functions similarly in Moore’s collection. As panic opens her daughter to the body’s strong energy, fear opens the speaker to the inner workings of her own life. She admits as much in “Bad at Bees,” the creative-non- ction-cumart-history essay that concludes Requeening. Of a queen bee cage she puts on her desk, the speaker says:

I hope no one will see it there and ask me about it, though, because I hate how I sound when I say things like ‘Yeah, I keep bees in my backyard,’ or ‘Yeah, I surf most mornings,’ or ‘Yeah, I’m a poet,’ as if I’m any good at any of it. I don’t really know what I’m doing most days. I just like to touch fear.

While her daughter, the new swarming queen, is in the season of claiming, the adult speaker must learn to hold not only desire, power, and joy, but also relinquishment, fatigue, and fracture if she is to be nourished by the rich totality of her experience. To that end, those lyrics that don’t reach for the intensity of the most searing poems in Requeening instead carry forward its main themes, and they are well-orchestrated. “Postern,” a short meditation on the imsiness of car doors, sets up the later “Gratitude” by bringing its speaker to realize “the limits of safety / where we put our faith / what we allow to hold us.” e shelter of childhood home and family, in the anaphoric litany of what is “gone” from “1729 Maple Avenue Northbrook IL,” is backdrop to “Gone Song,” a lovely sister poem to Linda Pastan’s “To a Daughter Leaving Home.” e brief but powerful “Melanoma” is informed by “After the Phone Call I Teach Book 11,” in which readers join the speaker in the distraction of attending to a roomful of ninth graders, one of whom, paraphrasing Achilles in the underworld, “opines / even the worst life is better than the best death,” only to end with the speaker’s abrupt return to herself and the diagnosis she received moments before class begun:

. . . I want to quibble with Achilles: it isn’t any life that’s better. It’s mine. It’s my life that needs to be saved.

Even “Domestic Short Hair,” in which the family woos a tough San Francisco street cat, subtly raises its stakes when the speaker asks her husband “what it is to domesticate / and demand loyalty in return”—a fraught trade she seems to have already made in the utterly wonderful “ e Broken Leg.” In masterly syntax and tonal shifts, “ e Broken Leg” moves from rasping honesty—

After the urry of surgeons and worry of permanent damage

there is the carrying of urine the changing of bandages the creak of crutches and incessant talk of scabs. . . .

In short, it’s unromantic,

this child in the shape of my husband, this outstretched hand, rumpled head and hungry mouth. And the bright side? Well, talk to me another day.

—to quiet comprehension—

en there is the moment we look across the bed at one another, mangled leg between us like a sleeping child, and understand this is what long love will one day be: a wheelchair, a diaper, a walker, forgetting, and then, for one of us, a solitude.

—to land in this stance, a kind of compromised, joyous rally, a bring-it-onto-the-end gameness that is the voice in Requeening at its most venturesome:

And yet, I don’t despise the bike that broke his leg and dragged us into knowing. At night when I replay in dreams the afternoon that ipped us both to the curb, sick wail of ambulance and everything that followed, I don’t always say Stop.

Don’t be a jackass. You don’t know what this will do to us. Sometimes I say Go faster. Let me see that trick you do again.

As I read and reread Requeening, especially the second half with its poems of diagnoses and loss, the nal couplet from Frost’s “ e Oven Bird” kept coming to mind. “ e question that he frames in all but words / Is what to make of a diminished thing.” I couldn’t immediately gure out why, because Moore’s poems portray, if anything, a rich resilience rather than diminishment. en I heard the famous lines anew: not “what to make of a diminished thing,” but “what to make of a diminished thing.” It would be a mistake to characterize Requeening as being narrowly “about” marriage and motherhood; these subjects supply the occasion for wide-ranging, inclusive, and resonant poems about making and how that relates to making a life. We are all contained by the limits of our past, our capabilities, and ultimately our mortality—“the queen must die,” as a famous beekeeping book puts it. Moore’s Requeening makes that containment capacious and rich, full of a bee’s “beauty and . . . churr” as well as the work of its life:

circle and comb,

tend brood, carry out the dead, lead all our voices to thrum.

Kim Addonizio’s eighth collection of poems, Now We’re Getting Somewhere, is alive with tension between the habits that dominated her earlier books and the emerging new truths of her later years (she was born in 1954). One famous inclination throughout her books has been to suggest that sexual romance is (though fraught with miseries) the only powerful escape from dreariness and dismay. At the same time, she has habitually presented her speaker as a jaded survivor of eros, someone who sees through romantic illusions. Addonizio can make both of those views convincing, but they become even more interesting when they intersect with other truths involving stoicism, humor, generosity, and hope; these attitudes have appeared in her earlier books but seem even more crucial for her in Now.

Fatalism about sexual desire and sexual role-playing and sexual disappointment has always been a central current in Addonizio’s books, so prominently and explicitly as to seem the necessary inspiring subject of her poetry. In my essay “Stuck in Desire: e Poetry of Kim Addonizio” ( e Hopkins Review 13.3, Summer 2020), I praised the clarity and variety of her representations of sexual longing and seeking and struggling and regretting and renewed seeking. All of this seemed courageously selfrevealing, encouraging the reader to accept and display one’s own midlife sexual energy with Addonizio’s nervy candor. A friend of Addonizio, however, soon told me I had mistakenly assumed that Addonizio is the speaker in all her poems that refer to sex. Maybe so. It is an assumption Addonizio has rendered tempting through many autobiographical details in her poems, as well as in her 2016 memoir, Bukowski in a Sundress: Confessions from a Writing Life. So often, she has written in the voice of a woman who has sought happiness in many sexual relationships and su ered many disappointments—a woman who is explicitly a poet in California, like Addonizio. e cumulative e ect is to give readers the illusion of personal kinship with a writer whose persistence is like ours. To be a tangled mess is, she lets us feel, not only interesting but sometimes admirable.

Sexual longing and sexual fatalism persist in Now We’re Getting Somewhere, but in a way less pervasively emphatic than in Mortal Trash (2016) and the books before that. Looking at Now on its own, we can see sexuality not so much as the maddening central force and rather as an inevitable part of a human lifetime. Addonizio’s compelling subject is herself—or the self, with whatever ripples in her relation to her speakers. She is driven to keep asking about the shape, pattern, meaning, value of her life. Sometimes she gives in to erce cynicism about it all. e shortest poem in Now is “Résumé”—eight lines, based on Dorothy Parker’s poem with the same title:

Families shame you; Rehab’s a scam; Lovers drain you And don’t give a damn. Friends are distracted; Aging stinks; You’ll soon be subtracted; You might as well drink.

at poem is too easy to quote and does not give us insights except that we realize she could not resist including it in the book. She must have enjoyed its hyper-simpli cation. You could suggest that the poem satirizes the attitude it expresses, but I’m afraid it is instead a brief giving-in to the force in Addonizio that is repulsed by conventional lyrical a rmations and that wants to squelch them by saying Oh come on let’s face it. “Résumé” o ers the pleasure of neat summation; the wish to depict her life as a whole won the day too easily. Fortunately, “Résumé” is not at all typical in a book full of long lines that seldom rhyme. Still, we note the temptation of bon mot boiling-down that our poet must dodge to give us the sensation of having met a woman living in the minutes and hours of real watching and longing.

In “Signs,” she looks from her window at passengers boarding a Brooklyn ferry and tries to resist heavy meanings in the images. Here is the rst stanza:

is morning the East River Ferry is just a boat pulling up to the ugly little park in Williamsburg & Manhattan isn’t the underworld projecting its eternal o ce buildings into those clouds e seagull landing on my balcony isn’t an image of transcendence or being destroyed by love

She is weary of the poetic readiness to nd symbols out there, though at the same time the idea of a at world of obvious facts is frightening—“as each special, unique individual in the long line below my window steps onto the ferry / as rain slips down not representing the Many cleaved from the One & black umbrellas unfold”—and she remembers seeing the recovered body of a woman who died by jumping from the bridge; her ambivalence about heavy portent is caught in this three-line stanza:

I’m sick of death & sick to death of romantic love but I still want to live if only to rearrange the base metals of my depression like canned lima beans on a mid-century modern dinner plate

at stanza is one of many spots where Addonizio makes clear—with self-jabbing humor—that she is all too aware of the critique risked by her ongoing self-portrayals. e third section of Now We’re Getting Somewhere is called “Confessional Poetry” and consists of either one poem with huge white spaces or 13 very short (from one line to four lines) poems spread across 13 pages. e entries satirize the self-absorption of poets who are called Confessional, but at the same time Addonizio is de antly committed to her work of self-study and launches pre-emptive strikes against glib reviewers. Here’s one entry:

All over the world, depressed, narcissistic little bitches are lling notebooks with their feelings

Sloppy, boring, grotesque, unfuckable feelings

What makes that interesting is that we can feel how she both recognizes truth in the generalization and scorns its nastiness.

Another “Confessional Poetry” entry (which I will assume does not refer to my 2020 essay) implies the poet’s pride in her sexuality in poems:

A beef-witted male critic is indexing my sins in a highly regarded literary publication

Supergluing my clitoris forever to the pillar of historical irrelevance

ere and elsewhere Addonizio shows she is not at all oblivious of likely attacks; she does what she does because she believes in it as pursuit of human truth from which sexual energy can’t be separated. e truth she pursues would be a deep answer to How are you? and What makes you tick? Often, it’s as if you’ve asked her those questions and the poem is a half-bitter half-playful talky response. “I am not a strong, independent person experiencing life to the full. . . . // I never learn from my mistakes. . . . Maybe you could be one of them. . . .” at’s from “Telepathy,” a poem about persistently undiscriminating attraction to men. It is funny but seriously worried, as are all the poems that lay out the aspects of a condition that hypothetically sums her up. Good poems of this kind include “Night in the Castle,” “In Bed,” “Song for Sad Girls,” “All Hallows,” “Ways of Being Lonely,” “Archive of Recent Uncomfortable Emotions,” and others; she keeps looking for a fresh strategy to give an honest summary of her life.

A series of self-portraits built of arrays of illustrative bits—this could be an unpromising recipe for a book by a weaker poet. Addonizio varies the pattern; there are in Now more than a dozen poems that depart from the task of gathering aspects-of-her-condition. One example is “Animals,” in which she argues against Whitman’s remark in “Song of Myself,” “I think I could turn and live with animals.” She knows that he was expressing an impulsive notion rather than a reasoned theory, but since she usually loves Whitman’s brash dismissals of propriety, she feels impelled to refute this insu ciently re ective one. What makes “Animals” work is not the rightness of her observations about animals being violent, voracious, or boring—it’s

our feeling of her emotional engagement, her wave of intelligent irritated realization that her own humanness is not placidly clear and simple like Whitman’s idea of animality. She says (in one of her pre-emptive selfdescriptions), “Walt, I actually like sweating & whining about my condition / Hot ashing & bitching in my cream satin sheets, lying awake drunk & weeping in the dark,” and the poem ends with these four lines:

Walt, Walt, I don’t think death is luckier or leads life forward like you said I don’t think I’m going to grow from the grass you love I’m just going to have one last blackout in a dirty pink lace dress & be eaten by tiny ugly legless larvae

(“Animals,” like many poems in this book, ends without punctuation.) ose larvae are driven by animal energy; her pink lace dress may be pathetic or absurd, but it re ects a human aesthetic choice. “Animals” is a clear and simple poem but not too simple, I think, because it gives us an exciting sense of listening-in-the-moment to our agitated poet who wants to nd her real view.

Another simple clear poem I would defend in the same way presents her ri ng inebriated awareness of global ecological catastrophe, “ e Earth is About Used Up.” e topic is horribly unlikely to allow a good poem, but Addonizio manages it by staying convincingly in the ickering ow of her musing on the global reality. She thinks of a forgotten box of National Geographics in a shed, and ends the poem with these three lines:

I’m standing on that box with my teeny megaphone, bringing you the news you know wildly virtue signaling waving my mortal handkerchief dropping it at your feet where it burns it burns here I don’t want it you take it please you take it

Here again the meaning is simple and clear, but not boringly so, because Addonizio so swiftly and honestly hits the wall of her wish—like yours and mine—for someone else to deal with environmental devastation.

In her many good poems you feel Addonizio wants to communicate genuinely, wants to reach you. at desire is fortunately stronger than her desire merely to impress or alarm you, and it generates clarity and convincingness in her self-portrayals, so that any element of narcissism is outweighed by her e ort to tell you the truth. In “Happiness Report,” she muses loosely on kinds of happiness for two pages and ends the poem with seven lines that brie y recall romantic ecstasy but then acknowledge the present pull of moody withdrawal:

at day at the museum I thought I want to climb to a great height and then fall through myself the way a man falls through me when I’m happy and in love Now I only want espresso and a little foam To stay in bed all day, Christmas lights blinking against the August heat Pigeons landing outside on the air conditioner walking around making soft noises and then fucking o Someone screaming in the street who isn’t me

We can feel that the poem has not pushed as far as it could into the idea of happiness, but there is something trustworthy in the un attering picture of herself in those last ve lines—they may be unfair to her, but they try to give the truth as she felt it in the moment.

And that truth of minimal irritable lonely survival is true in her reader’s life sometimes too. Addonizio is aware that she has a loyal audience, and in particular that thousands of women read her books, wanting to feel less lonely in their lives of desire and disappointment, “uncomfortable emotions.” Her wish to be helpful to her readers can prompt a too-easy encouragement, like the last seven words of “To the Woman Crying Uncontrollably in the Next Stall”—“listen I love you joy is coming.” But even that histrionic

avowal can sound real if heard in the dramatic context established by the poem’s title. And I think at the end of “Song for Sad Girls,” her sense of kinship with young women caught up in toils of romance and self-invention has some power because we believe she has herself made all their mistakes:

ere’s a low piano part in here somewhere, sinking under a wave of minor thirds. ere’s a plastic guitar with shitty strings and you think you’re that guitar nobody wants even for a weird art project. You don’t know that your trash and dead birds can cast beautiful shadows. You don’t know anything and I love you for that.

I will admit the last sentence there lacks nuance and I’m glad the poem does not end there; four lines follow:

Right now I feel like a menthol lter. I oat face-up in the toilet, my lipstick dissolving, as crowds of girls swirl by. I creak like a rusted-out insect trying to y. I spin around and around

for you and you only, scraping out this old, sad song.

What makes that work is the unexpectedness of the self-dejected metaphors of menthol lter and insect. Impulsive rather than nuanced, perhaps, but the sound is of a real person. She is not posing as a crusader of uplift. Indeed, depression and even despair have magnetic attractiveness for her—a compulsively recurring subject in all her books—and this force pulls against empathy and sympathy in a way she wants to recognize, wondering what in her life should be cherished.

She wonders this in “What to Save From the Fire” (in Mortal Trash) and sternly advises herself to “look at all those rosettes of self-pity / adorning the cake of your depression: / let the journals burn.” In “All

Hallows” she spends a page-and-a-half stewing in personal dismay about her own past but then rmly addresses a community of all “weird sisters” who have behaved self-destructively with alcohol and men. Here are seven lines that go from frazzled lament to imaginative undoing of Virginia Woolf’s suicide:

Oh my weird sisters, we’re not bad, just lost—look at Anne Sexton swirling overhead behind Plath & her impeccable broom, look at all the blottophiliac girls longing to faceplant in Mr. Death’s crotch

Ladies, women, darlings, bitches, you stop it right now & pay attention: Virginia Woolf is rising from the river, sloshing home to Leonard in her Wellingtons nothing in her pockets but bread

e poem does not o er other women a case for the lovely lovability of life—Virginia’s or their own—except insofar as the impulsive forwardleaning earnestness of voice itself becomes a kind of argument for vitality. It is a real argument, even if it was not enough to make Virginia Woolf choose to stay alive. Addonizio in “All Hallows” does not worry about being sentimental; she seems to feel she has fought her way to a spot beyond that danger, where she can in the last three lines instruct any women tempted by drowning:

You have to take out the stones & put them back where they belong You have to carve the names of the dead & then let rain & years destroy them e moon weakening like a cheap ashlight while your heart blinks on

e encouragement there is stronger for not sweetly promising happiness but suggesting that a sense of dignity in endurance will be reached.

Now ends with encouragement, telling us to stay alive. e book’s last poem “Stay” risks being too simple as advice, but I think it is alive as a poem; here are the last ve lines:

Now you can sob to an image of your friend a continent away & be consoled. Please wait for the transmissions, however faint. Listen: when a stranger steps into the elevator with a bouquet of white roses not meant for you,

they’re meant for you.

ose white roses of mourning could be meant for you in the sense that you will die, but at the same time when you see them you are suddenly reminded of being still alive.

Unrelaxed and unrelaxing, Kim Addonizio seems like a di cult friend, but a friend. She is often disappointed, hungry for more to happen between people. e book’s title points simultaneously to our dying—we are getting somewhere but not getting younger—and toward the hope for exciting connection. e phrase comes at the end of “Small Talk,” which consists of ten remarks that you could try in the rst minutes of conversation with a new acquaintance, if your impatience with shallow politeness makes you daring. e poem begins, “Let’s skip it and get straight to the rabid dog at hand.” “Small Talk” turns toward expecting complete failure of the encounter—unless conceivably the threat of failure inspires a sudden seriousness in the last of these four lines:

How many self-important wounds do you have? Everything you say is tiresome. I’m going to walk away slowly and not look back. Now we’re getting somewhere.

Being no longer young, and almost no longer middle-aged, Addonizio seeks and imagines people—friends, partners, readers—who have grown beyond clueless young vigorous optimism. Her jabs at youthful naïveté come frequently in Now. At the end of “In Bed,” she describes herself as “like a marmot burrowed deep under the snow / who can’t wake up from hibernation / while others crawl out, ravenous for spring”; at the end of “Signs,” she resorts to a consciously unreasonable simile to express her hostility:

the people who commuted across the river to work on Wall Street are still there, their eyes like suitcases of small, unmarked bills & everything is going to change for the worse

Alienation from zesty ripeness is an attitude in many honest poets after the age of 60. Yeats was only 58 when he said of Ireland, “ at is no country for old men”; he seems austerely isolated sailing to his dream-Byzantium, while Addonizio’s alienation seems to me (I am ve years older than she is) paradoxically sociable—her reader feels invited to join her in the wised-up group (in “August”) who have left the party “where the dancers blindside each other / with longing.” We won’t reach Byzantium, but we can enjoy the wit of our alienated friend.

And as I said earlier, her many self-deprecations tend to make us trust that her rejection of the thumping dancers is not a too-easy victory. She insists—with a bleak honesty like that of Philip Larkin in “Reasons for Attendance”—on acknowledging her own uncured wistfulness for the picnic of youth. She says in “August”:

Whatever it is in me that crawls like a wasp over the remains of a picnic, used napkins blown over the senseless grass—tell me how to kill it.

e pathos there is not funny, but tough humor is an element in Addonizio’s ongoing self-portrayal, audible in passages I’ve quoted, and humor is present alongside bitterness in the last self-portrait poem of Now We’re Getting Somewhere, “Little Old Ladies.” Here is the fth of its six stanzas:

Soon we’ll be pissing vodka in our bedpans pulling the re alarm, wandering out into tra c No one will know about our epic journeys down the hall sailing to the dining room & back or the monsters we had to bitch slap to come this far & survive

Funny and brave and angry all at once, “Little Old Ladies” is an impressive achievement by a poet who for so many years wrote the poems of a young and almost-young woman a long way from Assisted Living. Kim Addonizio is a strong brave funny angry poet who does keep getting somewhere.

Michelle Zauner, who is more widely known as the musician Japanese Breakfast, has devoted years and albums to her mother’s passing. Her 2016 release, Psychopomp, recorded just months after her mother’s death from cancer, features a picture of her mom reaching for the camera, never quite touching it. e album centers bright and soaring instrumentals that belie a deep and complex pain. is light and the dark coexisting in a fraught space is a staple of Zauner’s work, and the same duality characterizes Zauner’s recent back-to-back projects, the memoir Crying in H Mart and the album Jubilee. rough both media, Zauner has reimagined what it means to be an artist, to grieve publicly, and to nd solace in the everyday things.

Zauner, who studied creative writing at Bryn Mawr, has spent most of her creative career making music; however, when e New Yorker published her memoir’s titular essay in 2018, she became an overnight literary sensation. e essay went viral, and anticipation for a complete memoir became part of literary news. Even before its o cial publication date in late April 2021, it became clear that Crying in H Mart would be a breakout success. Shortly after the memoir’s release, in June 2021, Zauner dropped her third studio album, Jubilee.

I experienced Jubilee rst, in my bedroom late one night, hiding under the covers with the lights o . ere was a ghostly quietness, the perfect time to sink your teeth into a new record. e album opens with the electric “Paprika,” and I was struck on rst listen by the strength of Zauner’s voice. In interviews, Zauner has described Jubilee as a departure from her earlier works, an opportunity to write about joy and celebration after tackling grief and loss for so long. And it’s the re in Zauner’s voice, more so than the drums or the guitar or the bass, that conveys this sense of newness, of changing directions.

Japanese Breakfast has been called a lot of things: dream pop, indie rock, lo- . Yet on Jubilee, she refuses to be boxed in, to hue to one set of rules. “Be Sweet,” the second song on Jubilee, is all 80s nostalgia, drums

and heavy guitar. While opener “Paprika” leans into the indie aesthetic that she is so well known for, “Be Sweet” is a throwback, a call to a bygone era, cheery and danceable with a singing style reminiscent of Cyndi Lauper at the height of her powers.

“Kokomo, IN,” is the closest to a “sad song” on Jubilee. It begins with the lines, “If I could throw my arms around you / For just another day / Maybe it’d feel like the rst time.” Whether the song’s object is a lover is only partially clear. Lines like “Watching you show o to the world / e parts I fell so hard for” point to a romantic relationship. Yet the lyrics are ambiguous enough that anyone who has done a deep dive into Zauner’s body of work might be forgiven for thinking that this too is exploring the aftermath of deep grief.

If “Kokomo, IN” is the saddest song on Jubilee, then “Slide Tackle” is the darkest. “I want to be good,” Zauner sings in her trademark falsetto. “I want to navigate this hate in my heart.” e two extremes placed side by side, one tender, one forceful, more forceful than anything we have seen from Zauner so far, highlight the type of range that is so central to Zauner’s work, her ability to showcase a kaleidoscope of emotions and still have a streamlined and cohesive album. e star of Jubilee, however, is “Posing in Bondage,” which comes almost in the middle of the album. Here, the object is unambiguous, and the song is both dark and sensual. “Can you tell I’ve been posing / is way alone for hours?” Zauner sings. “Waiting for your a ection / Waiting for you.” An earlier version of “Posing in Bondage” was originally released in 2017. is album version is fuller, expansive. It rests at the intersection between longing and hyper-awareness. Zauner has called it a “fraught, delicate ballad.” e second half of the album also alternates between emotional highs and depressive lows. “Sit” sounds a lot like “In Heaven” from Psychopomp. Both songs share hazy guitar work, muted and fuzzy. “Savage Good Boy” is sonically the strangest song on the album. It opens like a children’s nursery rhyme, but one that has been co-opted to soundtrack a horror movie. It’s funny too, a skewering of a wealthy man and his stunted promises.

Jubilee closes with the slow and largely acoustic “Posing for Cars.” It’s a tting close to a whirlwind of an album, Zauner at her most poetic. e

six-minute song ends with a long electric guitar solo, cymbals crashing and crashing. It’s almost as though Zauner wants to cede the oor to her collaborators, to say, “And here is my team.”

I was so taken by Jubilee that I took the bus to my nearest bookstore the next day to get a copy of Crying in H Mart. I was sweating all the way home, where I sat on the oor and devoured the book in intervals over several days because the experience of reading Crying in H Mart was so visceral that I felt peeled as I ipped each page.

I was struck, rst and foremost, by Zauner’s level of detail throughout Crying in H Mart. In fact, the details in its essays—“the Tupperware container full of homemade banchan” in “Double Lid,” “Bryn Mawr’s stone architecture upright against the early signs of East Coast autumn” in “New York Style,” “the canopy of trees and ferns and moss all growing into each other” in “Dark Matter”—make the memoir come alive, the people and the places so well-rendered that they might as well be frozen in time.

And time is rightfully of the utmost importance in a memoir about grief. It moves non-linearly, beginning with Zauner’s mother Chongmi’s death and then backtracking. Zauner zooms in and out of di erent life stages, illuminating, with each chapter, the people, places, and things that shaped her relationship with her mother, herself, and her heritage.

Crying in H Mart is as much about the complicated relationship between mothers and daughters as it is about food and identity, the three things braided together throughout the memoir in ways that are at once eye-opening and heart-wrenching. Early on, Zauner discovers that “our shared appreciation of Korean food served not only as a form of motherdaughter bonding, but also o ered a pure and abiding source of her approval.” Food is one of the only things that comes with few rules in Zauner’s relationship with her mother, and it becomes a way for Zauner to reach a mother who is exacting and strict.

It’s no wonder then why, in the aftermath of her mother’s cancer diagnosis, Zauner looks to food, speci cally Korean food, as a form of solace. Some of the most heartbreaking moments in the memoir are the moments where Zauner, desperate to o er her mother healing, begins to cook for her. When her mother can hardly keep any food down, Zauner’s

desperation becomes an extension of her attempts to please her mother over the years, her struggles for approval.

Like the light and dark of Jubilee, Crying in H Mart is also a book of contrasts: contrasts on both physical and emotional levels. We go from the Oregon woods where Zauner was raised, to the Bryn Mawr campus, to a house in Philadelphia that has plywood for shelves and a couch pulled from a touring van. In addition, the memoir takes us from the US to South Korea, where Chongmi was born. e contrasts between these two countries, and between who Zauner and her mother are in these di ering environments, are some of the most poignant parts of the memoir. In Korea, for example, Zauner’s mother becomes daughter and sister in addition to mother. Zauner herself is niece, cousin, and granddaughter.

Ultimately these contrasts o er us a way into the more layered conversations around identity and race that are central to our understanding of the book. Zauner quickly discovers on her rst trip to Seoul that her “‘exotic’ look was something to be celebrated.” “I was pretty in Seoul,” she writes. is begins her complicated relationship with whiteness, a relationship marked by both a desire for it and a rebellion against it.

In the end, Crying in H Mart is a memoir about death and dying. From the clumps of her mother’s falling hair to her gaunt and emaciated body, the memoir is un inching in its depiction of cancer, of her mother’s ght with the disease and her ultimate death from it. In the last moments, Chongmi is a ghost of who she once was, and yet we see her in her fullness. When Zauner turns to Korean cooking videos to feel closer to her mother in the aftermath, we see her too in full.

I had put o reading Crying in H Mart for months after its release. I’d nd it at the bookstore, reach for it, and withdraw. I’d see links to the original New Yorker essay and ght the urge to click on it. ere are a slew of books I’ve avoided reading because I don’t quite feel emotionally ready. Crying in H Mart was one of them.

My own mother would take me and my siblings to our local H Mart and other international supermarkets like it when we were children, looking to nd the unique blend of ingredients— ai eggplant, pigeon peas—that we could not nd crammed in the “ethnic foods” aisle in your average

supermarket. As I read Crying in H Mart, I felt the distinct recognition that happens when someone articulates something that you have held within you for so long.

Mothers are complicated creatures. But the role of immigrant mothers like mine and Zauner’s is especially loaded with complexity. Food, the cooking and serving of it, becomes not just a practical exercise but a spiritual one, sometimes the only real connection the child of an immigrant mother has with their mother’s homeland.

In my rst months out of college, I took a job in Washington, DC and moved away from home for the rst time. I remember the distinct craving for my mother’s home-cooked meals, egusi soup with farina, jollof rice with goat meat, jumbo snails, yam porridge. I remember the sobering realization that because I did not know how to cook any of these foods, I was cut o from my mother in a fundamental way. ough distance is not the same thing as death, the pain of being cut o from one’s roots felt familiar as I read Crying in H Mart. I felt seen in a way that was both soothing and devastating. I connected with the complicated experience of a hyphenated Americanness, the struggle to reconcile parts of oneself that are often at odds with each other.

Zauner, through Jubilee and Crying in H Mart, reimagines not only a creative playbook but the process of public grief. In these works, Zauner shows that art can be as big in scope as it is intimate. We can touch on large topics while remaining true to the details. Ultimately, art, in its many forms, has the power to be both a tool of expression and a means of healing. In an age when we are supposedly more connected than ever, it’s the everyday things—a stocked kimchi fridge, for example—that really bring us closer to ourselves and to one another.

It begins when a pickup truck pulls alongside the airstrip as the rst ngers of yellow-purple stretch across the treetops. Amra Boustani tightens the last nut on the new tail brace wire assembly she’s been working on since before daylight. Up all night preparing a sermon for some future Sunday, she’d poured one too many cups of co ee. e man steps down from the pickup and pulls the waist of his pants up to a suitable height. A local soybean farmer, he needs Amra to make a run over his eld. His wife would normally have this scheduled way out in advance, but yesterday he noticed soybean loopers on the undersides of his leaves and fears they’ll be the end of his crop if he sits and does nothing. ey stand beside the duster. Today would be as good a day as any if she can make it work. Amra has own his eld several seasons and knows she could mark the spray lines with closed eyes. She sets the wrench back in the box, wipes her hands on her pants. She glimmers as the sun rises behind her, and she sticks out her slender hand for his to shake.

Amra Boustani never lived but in the imagination of Arkansas poet Greg Alan Brownderville. Her story is merely one element—albeit the subject of the central mystery—of the poet’s latest project: Fire Bones. A synopsis of the narrative, provided on the project’s website, tells us what we need to get started:

No one knows what happened to Amra Boustani. A pilot and Pentecostal preacher from the Delta, she vanished on a transatlantic ight over a year ago and has been missing ever since. Enter a poet named Greg and a lmmaker named Bart, who pass through Amra’s hometown and get swept up in her story. Greg and Bart meet a host of colorful characters with clashing opinions about Amra and her mysterious disappearance. e townsfolk turn on each other in their confusion and frustration, but a breakthrough seems possible when a boy YouTuber in Lebanon unveils new information about “eerie, disappeary Miss Amra Boustani.”

Fire Bones presents a collection of poems and a fresh take on narrative and lyrical expression—something Brownderville has coined a “go-show.” Because most of us reach rst for our cell phones, a go-show tells a story episodically via multiple media online. On the Fire Bones website, one will nd podcasts that provide context and backstory for the characters and settings, short lms, music videos (all music and lyrics performed and written by the poet and a few close friends), poems, visual art, and still images. Each go-show episode uses whichever medium Brownderville felt worked best for the story he wanted to tell.

Some folks nd it hard to stay on the swath in the eld. It’s di erent from mowing the lawn, they’ll tell you. When you mow, you pick a point on the horizon or put a wheel on the edge line of where you’ve already cut. At ten feet above the ground and a hundred- fty miles per hour, it can be hard to tell where you’ve already sprayed. In the old days, some pilots had a man standing in the eld with a ag to mark out the rows for spraying. ese days, most pilots use a gps light bar that shows them where they need to open the hopper or if they’ve moved o their swath. Even with the gps, something Amra still refuses to use, some young pilots complain about task saturation—a kind of mental exhaustion caused by the danger from all the repetition in a day’s work. e truth of it is that Amra doesn’t feel exhaustion; she feels elation. She loves the repetition, sees the patterns come to life in the crops. She once heard someone say repetition is the signal quality in poetry and music. Maybe all of art, she’d thought to herself. To her, ying the lines is like meditation—like repeating a mantra. Faith and art bound into one. Amra is a god poet in the duster. She speaks life to the earth when her hopper opens, or, with a simple push from the same hand, utter desolation. Her mind unbuckles as she dips. It gapes wide open as she rises and rides the edge of a stall to swing back and hit the next swath in the precise spot needed.

Prosimetrum, from Dante to Chaucer to Shakespeare, in its most basic description, blends prose with verse. e haibun melded prose and haiku. e go-show is not unlike Shakespeare’s prosimetrum or Bashō’s haibun for the digital age. Brownderville, whose poetry nds more common ground with Yeats, Stevens, and Frank Stanford than Bashō, has written pieces in prosimetrum before. I interviewed him back in 2016 and asked him why he used prosimetrum in his book A Horse with Holes in It. e melding of ideas, forms, and genres shone in the standout poem “ e Homemade Fireworks.” He explained:

How does Shakespeare do it? How does he manage to give us such great lyric poetry, blazing and beautiful and free of narrative responsibility, within stories as complex and satisfying as the greatest novels? One thing I kept noticing is that Shakespeare rarely does his most di cult narrative spadework within his most lyrical soliloquies. at’s done by more pedestrian, utilitarian lines elsewhere in the plays. e stories are there, with all of their drama, all of their implications, underneath and all around the soliloquies, imbuing them with meaning, giving them extra lyrical launch. e prose sections of a prosimetrum allow me to set the stage, to get my narrative work done, and then break free into lyric. I can avoid the narrative-lyric compromises that are right for some poems but terribly sti ing in others.

In the go-show, Brownderville builds on the foundation of the prosimetrum through ve general components. e rst two re ect the prosimetrum and haibun most closely: poetry and prose. is prose, though, is told in the ubiquitous style of the narrative podcast (think true crime and npr) and through monologue. Brownderville did not write Fire Bones for the page— it’s meant to be viewed online or via smartphone. Original music and lyrics tell part of the story as well. In the fth component of the go-show, we nd visual folk art.

In “Will Travel for Ice Cream,” the fourth episode of Fire Bones, Greg tells his new friend Bart about the poetry he’s been writing:

Lately I’ve been writing these poems about how you can feel like a play with a bunch of di erent characters in it, and you don’t really know whether you’re one of the characters or all of them, or maybe the playwright or the play itself, or maybe just somebody out in the audience feeling kind of lost.

e persona poems in Fire Bones feature di erent characters from the narrative. It should be clear that there is a component of Brownderville himself inside each of these speakers. e reader will notice a smithereen motif throughout the poems (and in the lyrics to one important song), echoing the explosions, destruction, and proliferation of selves through masking and experimentation with di erent personae. e characters engage in this during various episodes, and to some extent, the poet himself, in writing all these characters, has created a strange kind of autobiography. When Amra’s ex, the past-obsessed Ju Mon Poy, writes “Best Year Biscuit” (a lament in recipe format similar to Ferlinghetti’s “Recipe for Happiness Khaborovsk or Anyplace”) about the loss of Amra in the form of a recipe, we understand there are slivers of the poet in these lines as well.

One should imagine a lm in which a man has been blown to “smithereens” after lying on a grenade. Cut to a wider shot, and the person behind the proverbial curtain rewinds the scene in slow motion. e viewer notices all the pieces of Fire Bones’s splintered characters, forms, and genres come together again to re-form the whole man. It’s then we realize the man—and all those pieces—has all along been the poet himself. It’s then we realize he’s the one behind the curtain too.

With her hopper full of the proper mix of water, methoxyfenozide, and spinetoram—a concoction suited to wipe out an entire population of soybean loopers in less than four hours post-spray—Amra starts her mental, pre-run checklist. Her eyes move over the instruments to make sure they’re online, showing the proper indications, and she moves her hands over the controls. Each of them—the dump handle, which Amra calls the “money handle,” the

power lever. ey’ve all got the play and feel they’re supposed to. She closes her eyes and breathes in through her mouth and nose in meditation. She pictures her sport-yellow duster rising against the sky like a raptor, its wingshadow casting a dark cross against the Delta elds it blows through. en, a vision of patchy grass, stones, sand, and re. Her eyes ash open to the runway awaiting her departure.

Homeschool us. Teach us again about the plus. You ew your cruci x and drew the sky: one light, whole soul. Without you, how to mend our smithereens? Who but you can help this fallen letter I that can’t remember how to stand, tumbled to pondpage— this drifting minus sign?

“ e Plus,” a poem brooding on the language of loss—and the orthography of the plus and minus symbols and what they become when broken—does its best to mask depth in its use of short sentences and simplistic language. Part of the poem’s immense charm lives in this wondering voice, a voice that uses words like “smithereens” and “pondpage” (a reference to a moment in the episode “ ree Ways of Looking” where we see the image of a lone swan feather oating on a pond). e idea of a piece of something drifting on water also evokes the possibility—a clue toward solving the mystery—that Amra might have crashed or been shot down.

e most likely speaker, Amra’s adopted daughter Gobody, acts as the collective “us” and conveys anything but a simple situation. Here Brownderville evokes the image of Amra’s plane (its shape like a plus, a cross, a cruci x, a little “t”)—and life—come undone. ese images consolidate the simple shape of a crop duster against the background of sky with the dismantling of language (the “t” like a plus) in grief, faith (the cross), and perhaps art itself. e plus, the plane, the cross, after all, “drew the sky.” Minus language, art, and faith—with Amra removed from the larger whole—all that is left is for the “I” to fall back to earth alone, identity blown to smithereens.

In writing “ e Plus” through the voice of the ever open-hearted Gobody, the poet seems to agree with Wallace Stevens’s famous idea that the nobility of poetry “is the imagination pressing back against the pressure of reality.” In this case, that pressure of reality can be found in Gobody’s sorrow, mixed with her admiration for, and almost dei cation of, Amra. Imagination can maintain us even under the most mysterious or awful circumstances.

Redwing blackbirds roost in ocks by the millions in these parts of the Arkansas Delta. Amra still remembers hearing about several thousand of them dropping dead on New Year’s Eve a few years back. Such a mystery. e scientists had explanations if you were inclined to believe them. Some of the locals whispered about a mystic poet who’d thrown a hex onto a girl that wouldn’t love him. e dark magic had killed the birds, they said. She believes in magic and has seen her share of darkness. Later, that poet went on to write a book and admitted he’d done the thing. She keeps it on her shelf and reads those poems sometimes when the satellite goes out. One thing she likes to do when ying is repeat lines from a poem about blackbirds. It’s one more thing to keep her mind sharp. She’ll begin, “Four: A man and a woman / Are one. / A man and a woman and a blackbird / Are one.” When she nishes the poem, sometimes she’ll say, “Wallace Stevens.”

Recalling his time as a 19-year-old undergrad in his 1995 essay “Wallace Stevens in the World,” Robert Hass remembers his rst thoughts of Stevens’s “ e Emperor of Ice Cream.” He took Stevens’s poem as “permission to have fun, to live in the spirit of comedy.” As time went on, Stevens’s work budded then bloomed in Hass’s mind—his initial feelings adjusted. Hass found absurdity in “ e Emperor of Ice Cream,” but soon realized Stevens’s poetry and this poem particularly was “point-blank and very dark . . . mordant, sardonic, pitiless.” Hass also allows himself to read the poem in a way that “there is no emperor but ice cream, no real alternative to death but dessert while you can get it.” e poems in Fire Bones invite similar rereading, equal parts “horny feet,” cheap pine dressers “lacking the three glass knobs,” and the concupiscence one rightfully feels for homemade ice cream.

Recalling Stevens’s recurring declarative mode, the poem “Kooky Cookies” (found in Episode 11) assembles a series of preposterous announcements and proclamations: “Call your phone your ‘fun’ at all times. When people ask, deny you’re doing / it.” “Cutter-Morning Star is an Arkansas school district. Git you some of that.” We see this poem delivered on-screen, not as words on a blank page, but through disembodied hands cracking fortune cookies, each line pulled from its cookie’s rubble and delivered to us in succession. With each fortune, the lines turn sharply from ridiculous and comedic to devastating. e turn happens around line 12 when Brownderville writes, “You’ll never thrive. at said, a football player named Wonderful Terry will exist,” until, nally, simply, “Some world” slams the poem shut like the lid of a heavy co n. It’s here we understand there’s no line between Brownderville’s ludicrousness and his emotional ferocity. It’s all the same. e connections between Stevens’s work and several key details throughout Fire Bones are hidden in plain sight. In the project’s aesthetic statement, Brownderville writes, “Even as the story serves up serious social commentary and heartbreaking moments of love and loss, it is frequently bizarre, colorful, and humorous, underscoring the theme of play that runs throughout the show.” Like Hass said, no emperor but ice cream. Fire Bones’ narrative arc begins when Brownderville and friend Bart Weiss nd themselves on a quest to locate quality Delta ice cream (with the right

texture and butter-fat content). In the nal episode we learn there’s an ice cream shop in Beebe, Arkansas, called (what else?) e Emperor of Ice Cream. Brownderville also telegraphs connections to Stevens’s work by way of multiple references to blackbirds. e poet has his own history and mysterious connection to the redwing blackbird, and listeners with a sharp ear will catch the abrupt note and trill throughout speci c episodes. In Episode 37, “ ree Ways of Looking” (a nod to Stevens’s “ irteen Way of Looking at a Blackbird”) we see ocks of redwing blackbird imagery come together—as the lumbering synths in Brownderville’s song “Beebe” rollick beneath—into the crop duster, into Amra’s own ight.

Many things can bring you down, she thinks—power lines, dead trees (because their leaves have fallen with time), exhaustion. Most folks don’t think about how dangerous it is ying a duster. Sure, everyone likes to tell a story about how one ew—couldn’t ‘a been more than a few feet—above their car that one afternoon, but it can be deadly. Quick turns make the job easier, but they take a lot of skill. Not every man with his hand on the stick can do it like Amra without risking it all. Quick turns mean more time to do the job, to drop your yield. at means you get more acres done, more money in your back pocket. She pulls up at the last second, the bare limbs close to slashing the belly of the duster. Each pass, she pulls above those branches, rounds the bend close to stalling, to dropping into a spin. She knows the plane’s limits. Today the duster shakes—she takes it right to the edge. e tail wobbles and knocks. e stick rattles in her hand. She smiles and pushes slightly on the stick to prevent the unthinkable. She recites a few lines from that book on her shelf: “I said the spell. I still remembered it. I remember / almost midnight, / when it started raining blackbirds. Let the sparks go up / and the darks come down.” Another tight turn. She speaks to the dead trees before her again: “Let the sparks go up / and darks come down.” e hopper opens and the spray stripes down the eld.

She is the jaguar, born a moccasin, rst cursed in this worldtown. Never lost her swim. New legs. New fangs. A scriptured pelt. It’s time. She climbs the magic tree. Between her shoulders, one rosette the shape of a question mark rips open and sprouts wings. e poetry peels from her body. Call her cloud crescendo, tornadovolcano—she is your sky. She shuts her eyes and pictures her dad, her mom, her childhood without that bomb. Look up. Do you see? It’s the devil dragon. She is made of roaring and re. Best believe she will kill you back.

In “ e Dragon,” the speaker, who is most likely Lucy, a political poet with an experimental bent, presents Amra as ruthless—a erce avenger. is far cry from Gobody’s description of her in “ e Plus” reminds us of Sylvia Plath’s phoenix rising from ash to “eat men like air.” ose taking Fire Bones in will wonder until the nal episode whether Amra Boustani will be Lazarus’d from the tomb or stay fallen from the sky after “ e poetry / peels / from her body.”

In “Best Year Biscuit,” we see the poem as artifact, written freehand on a piece of looseleaf paper complete with messy fringe and our-stained. e aesthetic presentation of this piece beautifully complements its tone, mood, and meaning. e poem begins with a list of ingredients (written by a speaker with an unruly, broken heart) as any recipe would: “1 fortune cookie, stale / 1 whole life / 45 memories Madre Hill / pinch of crazy.” e poem comes to life in the instructions for preparation. Here Brownderville again makes use of Stevens-esque declarative statements bearing equal amounts darkness and light—caustic and gleeful:

Pulverize cookie and remove fortune without reading, drop fortune in skillet and sear on high heat. Rake ashes into urn and set aside. Knead life, roll out on wax paper, and cut into 51 years using wide mouth jar. Keep best year and place rejected life plus cookie smithereens in TIGHTLY sealed container and discard. Put best year in sugar bowl and store in icebox overnight. Pour Madre memories into brain and try to sleep, stirring constantly. Next morning, transfer best year to baking stone, sprinkle with crazy and place in oven. Turn on light but not heat and watch forever. When timer says forever’s up, remove from oven and serve on cracked red plate. Garnish with fortune’s ashes.

(Feeds 2 but 1 is missing.)

In the recipe format, Brownderville has chosen the perfect vessel for Ju Mon Poy’s unbounded grief. “Best Year Biscuit” is the most successful poem in the Fire Bones project, capturing the spirit of the whole undertaking and

distilling it into one deceptively simple bit of writing. Yeats wrote in “Adam’s Curse,” “… A line will take us hours maybe; / Yet if it does not seem a moment’s thought, / Our stitching and unstitching has been naught,” and Brownderville aspires to this idea in every line he writes. He designed these poems to subvert our expectations at every step. e entire Fire Bones project feels designed to surprise us at every turn. I imagine Brownderville nds great delight in catching us o guard by ghting shy of the expected regional clichés, insisting instead on presenting the complexity of Delta society that shines through in this work. ough Fire Bones emerged from the mind of a single poet, we must remember he is a product of the great multiplicities of the Delta itself. Our romantic ideal of the creative writer has traditionally included solitude, a pen, and paper: the lone mind and its creation. But a go-show is highly collaborative. It involves directors of photography, producers, actors, musicians, and visual artists. anks to the remarkably diverse group of people who breathed creative life into Fire Bones, the go-show authentically re ects a complicated mix of geographies, histories, and cultures. is important collaborative dimension of the go-show form helps bring the art to life in new, compelling ways.

She is far from home. Amra Boustani is about to live or die.

She ghts with the stick, says, “ irteen: It was evening all afternoon. / It was snowing / And it was going to snow. / e blackbird sat / In the cedar-limbs.” is is the end of that old poem she memorized. e ground rushes toward her. Or maybe she rises high above it, keeping the earth far below her like it’s always been. Let be be nale of seem. Somewhere, someone gets hungry for ice cream.

Celine Sciamma’s Petite Maman is a movie that, in many ways, shouldn’t have worked. Made during lockdown with a cast of ve, two of whom are eight-year-old twins, it is a cross-generational, time-travel lm that outs the narrative framework by which crossgenerational and time-travel lms (Big, Vice Versa, Back to the Future) have been known to succeed: young person who nds parent hopelessly clueless visits the past and realizes 1) their parent was once young like them, with a comparably raucous array of insecurities, quirks, and lovable vices, and 2) the cultural circumstances that surrounded that parent’s youth were once, miraculously, cool in their own right. Petite Maman does not concern itself with how much “things have changed” externally from era to era, but rather with how little, if anything, changes between mothers’ and daughters’ interior landscapes. Girlhood, speci cally, is less an exuberant, and inherently super cial, stage of emotional and sartorial expression so much as an introspective period of discovery, resourcefulness, and signi cant loss. Motherhood, too, is devoid of pat virtue and ready transcendence; who is mothering whom is of consistent debate. e plot is at once as austere and audacious as Sciamma’s signature cinematographic style: a girl named Nelly (Joséphine Sanz) loses her grandmother and sets o from the nursing home with her mother Marion (Nina Meurisse) to her bucolic childhood home, which Nelly has never visited, to clear the house with her mellow husband (Stéphane Varupenne). After Marion abruptly departs the second morning of their stay, Nelly is left to entertain herself on her own, seeking out the spot where her mother once built a tree fort long ago in the nearby woods. It is there that she meets another eight-year-old girl (Gabrielle Sanz), her more delicate, feminine doppelganger, dragging timber to form a fort herself. After a few days festooning the cabin with ery foliage, Nelly realizes that Young Marion is, in fact, her own mother, and the woods an autumnal portal to the past. eir domiciles are identical, but for the presence of Marion’s in rm mother (Margot Abascal), Nelly’s grandmother in middle age, su ering from an unnamed hereditary a iction for which eight-year-old Marion must be treated in an impending operation.

Much has been already made of Sciamma’s shift away from the erotic charge and scenic grandeur of her 2019 Portrait of a Lady on Fire, which chronicles an 18th century love a air on a Breton island between an aristocratic woman, Héloïse (Adèle Haenel), and her portraitist Marianne (Noémie Merlant). But in so many ways, Petite Maman is invested in the same one-on-one interactions and hushed intimacies of daily life. As few critics have noted, Portrait did not indulge in the predictably decadent ballroom scene of obscenely formal yet debauched merrymaking between members of the noblesse, nor did it include more than a handful of scenes that included more than two or three characters. In both lms, the camera is xed the vast majority of the time on two or three women—if not one woman, or girl, willfully moving through the world on her own.

While Nelly and Young Marion’s relationship is familial and unequivocally platonic, the ways in which it tenderly ourishes—board games, cocoa drinking, messily mixing crepe batter—resemble the late-night rounds of cards between Héloïse, Marianne, and Sophie, their servant. What Sciamma is clearly concerned with is closeness between women, and girls, and how naturally female bonds, erotic or not, can blossom. In both Portrait and Petite, the camera lingers on the splendid tensions inherent in the vicissitudes of early friendship: pausing before asking another’s name, how old she is, whether she can play with you the following day—these risks are no less so in the platonic realm than the erotic. Sciamma insists on the seriousness of friendship, just as she insists on the complexity of childhood. Per her restrained mise en scène, extensive dialogue is swapped for potently auditory sensory experience. If timbre is a turn-on in Portrait of a Lady, in Petite Maman, common sounds often assume a companionate quality that o sets solitude. e clang of a tin of trinkets, the rhythm of teeth punctiliously brushed, the soft scratch a pencil slowly forming letters on loose leaf—Nelly’s tactile, tangible world is also a deeply sensual one. Foley, for Sciamma, achieves the level of song. roughout, the sounds of girlhood are blessedly free of contrived melodic levity. “Au revoir,” Nelly declares atly, in her corduroy overalls, to each old woman in the pastel rooms of her grandma’s nursing home. As in the director’s earlier oeuvre, Petite Maman’s pathos is daringly understated;

an almost Bressonian lack of a ect accompanies the delivery of the characters’ most relevant, vulnerable acts and admissions. “I have a secret,” Nelly tells Young Marion on a sunny afternoon together, gazing plainly at her friend as the leaves rustle beyond. “Promise me you’ll believe me. . . . I’m your child. I’m your daughter.” “You’re from the future?” her playmate counters, betraying barely a hint of surprise. Similarly, Adult Marion’s decision to leave her husband, daughter, and childhood home is deliberately played down; we are left to wonder, as Nelly must, just why she took o sans warning, why her a able, bearded husband is left to handle her dead mother’s stead on his own. As Nelly searches her grandmother’s property— in the past and in the present—she takes on a Gallic Nancy Drew quality, more stealthy than fearless, quietly self-reliant.

An ’80s tomboy myself, born a year after Sciamma, I, like Nelly, fancied myself a solitary adventurer and always adored a good tree fort. I never dreamed in any speci c terms of being a mother, and indeed at some point felt a gnawing terror that my growing collection of dolls, which I admired for their attire but more so deemed a lucrative investment, were meant to groom me for the role. at my own mother, like Marion, had me at a very young age, and, like Marion, su ered from depression, felt patently imbricated in my brain from around the time I was eight years old. My own mother was not even 30 at the time, but I recall feeling a potent mix of pity and confusion at her mounting enervation, frustration, and intermittent rage in response to her boisterous brood of dramatic daughters, all four of us born by the time she was 26. By adolescence, wonderfully fueled with the ery indignation of riot grrrl anthems, any sense I had of my mother was de ned by negation; anything she was, I was not, and anything she wasn’t, I would surely become. Memories of any bond were relegated to our bus rides in the mid 1980s, before my mother obtained her driver’s license, when our afternoons were shaped by any number of fantastic errands to the grocers, library, or half-o bread store. Everywhere we went felt loaded with meaning—because, of course, it was. e dehistoricized semiotics of Petite Maman are bound to speak across generations, but perhaps especially to those who came of age before the digital era. Unlike Portrait, Petite Maman is—strangely, marvelously—bereft

of conspicuous markers of time. Marion’s childhood stead could be a quaint present-day Airbnb. Nelly’s white-and-red-striped blue jacket looks like it could be from 1982 or 2022; iPhones are absent but an led headlamp carves a path to Grand-mère’s empty old home, the interior design of which looks at once stalled in the 60s and loyally maintained by an elder owner. “I’m a 42-year-old woman, I grew up as a child in the 80s and 90s,” said Sciamma to the Hollywood Reporter after the lm’s 2021 premiere at the Berlin Film Festival. “A lot in the lm I took from my own childhood. But from the response to the lm so far it seems people can relate to it, whatever generation you come from.” e woods, of course, are timeless, as is the waterpark to which, at the climax of the lm, Marion and Nelly joyfully abscond in an in atable raft to the sounds of Para One’s “La Musique du Futur.” As they paddle across Cergy-Pontoise’s lake—Nelly leading at the front, Marion in the rear—they seem, at eight, invincible and free, indomitable agents of their own unprecious fates.

To put two girls at the helm, charging ahead, with not another soul, adult or child, in sight, feels itself hopeful, though subtly skirting the trappings of “girl power” platitudes. Explaining why it was crucial to make Petite Maman during a global pandemic, Sciamma did not mince words. “How many grandmothers had died in nursing homes without their goodbyes? It felt valid, and even more urgent, to have this lm that was coping with loss,” she told Indiewire in March 2021, “It was a tool for the imagination. We need those to dream of the future.”

Two weeks into the pandemic lockdown in 2020, March 31st commemorated my own loss—of a could-be child conceived in a French-speaking town with a French-speaking man in Canada. For the ten disquieting, exhilarating weeks that I was pregnant, the future felt imminently, wondrously lambent. I was almost 40 and the prospect of motherhood, however unexpected and duly terrifying, seemed handed to me as an act of largesse by a less than kind universe. Nearly three weeks after this discovery, on a bench in Montreal’s Parc Lahaie, the father of this could-be child—divorced and already a father to two little girls I’d never meet—gently and insistently repeated “No involvement” in English, my terrier curled below his legs. I was urged to end the pregnancy, as I was (less

adamantly) implored, two days later, during a ve-hour walk in yet another tree- lled park, with my same scrappy dog. No involvement, no matter. My new chapter had nigh begun.

Aren’t children forever the dream of the future? An escape from our own fractured, irredeemable presents? A tenuous promise of redemption for however we’ve failed ourselves, and the planet, for however many years we’ve trod and tripped upon it? Petite Maman somehow indulges this fantasy, while never blithely suggesting that having children will make us happy, or that being a child is itself a happy experience. “Did I want you?” Young Marion asks when learning of Nelly’s provenance. “Yes,” she responds. But it does not matter. Mothers can want their children and wind up miserable, just as mothers can dearly wish to avoid motherhood and wind up happier than they ever knew possible. In so many ways, Nelly plays “little mother” to Adult Marion after her mother’s death; on the drive from the nursing home, she hand-feeds her mother cheese sticks and a juice box from the back of their sedan as Marion focuses on the road, reaching her small arms around her mother’s neck in a consolatory hug. “I’m sad too,” she assures her mother later that night, when Marion struggles to fall sleep on the midcentury sofa.

With Young Marion—the girl who does not yet realize what is to come, how hard things will be, what sorrows await—Nelly is equally nurturing. at Nelly presents as androgynous aside from a sublime bramble of a ponytail does not dilute her maternal instincts, but rather exempli es the fallacy that nurturing is naturally feminine and that the outwardly femme are naturally better nurturers. Toward the end of the lm, as Nelly helps Young Marion pack for her trip to the hospital for her operation, Marion inquires whether Nelly is worried that her adult mother will not come back. “A little,” she admits. “My mother is often sad. She is not glad to be around.” In response, Marion says stoically, “It’s not your fault. . . . You didn’t invent my sadness.” e self-possessed quality that both girls share feels entirely believable; Petite Maman does not infantilize girls, or mothers, in the way we are, sadly, primed to expect from mainstream cinema. Nor does the lm suggest that Nelly and Young Marion are naïve or innocent; they are, instead, keenly aware of the gravity of loss, how it a ects their parents’ hearts no less—but also perhaps no more—than their own.

I don’t remember exactly when I realized my mother was grappling with sadness, but I am grateful that I remember a time in childhood when this was not the case—when my mother was bouncy, opinionated, forthcoming in ways that would get her in trouble with checkout clerks or bossy men. When I lost my pregnancy a few days prior to my 40th birthday, my mother was not apprised of it, as she had not been apprised that I was pregnant in the rst place. And when she was apprised of both, she did her best to actively ignore the stakes of the matter. No involvement, for her, meant no possibility to make things even worse. Of course, she can’t be blamed for not knowing my degree of devastation, that, as a single woman in my late 30s, I had already, at great labor and expense, frozen my eggs not once, but twice, in hope that I would someday meet the right guy (she couldn’t be told, given her religious views). And it is also arguable that she could not be blamed for not knowing how to mother me at this time when she herself had never been well mothered. Would I (could I?) have been any better, had my pregnancy come to term?

Petite Maman does not suggest that mothers or daughters can save one another—from loneliness, heartbreak, the forests of woe—but it insists on a type of talismanic empathy that springs from acknowledging the other as an emotional equal. Nelly does not just imagine her mother as an eight-yearold, she physically interacts with her; she laughs at her jokes and towels her rain-sodden hair. She cavorts with not just her mother’s inner child, but her physical embodiment, a girl as creative and pensive as herself. A girl just as lonely.

In the nal scene, mother and daughter a rm the other through simply, profoundly, uttering her name. “Marion,” Nelly says to her mother, who sits cross-legged on the oor of her childhood home, remorseful for her disappearance. “Nelly,” Marion says in return, pulling her close. During the end credits, the lyrics of “Music for the Future” appear at the lower left corner of the screen, as though to lead us all in existential sing-a-long. “Le rêve d’être enfant avec toi ( e dream of being a child with you) / Le rêve d’être en n loin de toi ( e dream of nally being away from you) / Le rêve d’être enfant avec toi ( e dream of being a child with you) / Le rêve d’être en n avec toi ( e dream of nally being with you). . . .” a choir of children

sing. e dual dreams of connection to and liberation from the mother remain gloriously inextricable. And, vitally, they are dreams, not reality. “Si mon cœur est dans ton cœur, ton cœur (If my heart is in your heart, your heart) / Ton cœur est dans mon cœur (Your heart is in my heart) / Si ton cœur est dans mon cœur, mon cœur (If your heart is in my heart, my heart) / Mon cœur est dans ton cœur (My heart is in your heart).”

Of course, the operative term here is “if”—and one must wonder, for how many daughters and mothers is this dream attainable? Perhaps it is enough to wish that it can be? To relish the gooey, claustrophobic fact that we, at some point, were one, however transitory or imperiled such a union might have been? Perhaps we must endeavor to listen—anxiously, tenaciously—for the beat of a heart worth comforting, worth frolicking to, if the future is ever to unfold for anyone.

Petite Maman puts great faith in the inevitable failure of motherhood as salvo, and in the decision to dip your oar in anyway—as though on a dare from an unkind universe—that the waters might deliver you onward.

ELIJAH BURRELL is the author of e Skin of e River (2014) and TROUBLER (2018), both published by Aldrich Press. His writing has appeared in AGNI, North American Review, Southwest Review, e Rumpus, Sugar House Review, and elsewhere. He is an associate professor of English at Lincoln University in Je erson City, Missouri.

STEPHANIE BURT is Professor of English at Harvard. Her recent books include After Callimachus (Princeton UP, 2020) and Don’t Read Poetry: A Book About How to Read Poems (Basic, 2019). A new collection from Graywolf will appear in late 2022. Ask her about the X-Men.

ANDREA COHEN is the author of seven collections of poetry, including, most recently, Everything. A new collection, e Sorrow Apartments, is forthcoming. She directs the Blacksmith House Poetry Series in Cambridge, MA.

JALEN EUTSEY is a poet, librarian, and sportswriter from Miami, Florida. He received an mfa in Poetry from the Writing Seminars at Johns Hopkins University. His work has been published in or is forthcoming from South Florida Poetry Journal, Nashville Review, storySouth, Harpur Palate, and others.

EILEEN G’SELL is a poet and critic with regular contributions to LARB, Hyperallergic, DIAGRAM, the Boston Review, and other outlets. Her rst volume of poetry, Life After Rugby, was published in 2018; in 2019 she was nominated for the national Rabkin Foundation award in arts journalism. She teaches at Washington University in St. Louis.

BECKY HAGENSTON is the author of four story collections, most recently e Age of Discovery and Other Stories (Mad Creek Books, 2021) which won e Journal’s Non/Fiction Book Prize. She is a professor of English at Mississippi State University.

MARK HALLIDAY ’s seventh book of poems, Losers Dream On, appeared in 2018 from the University of Chicago Press. He teaches at Ohio University.

SPENCER HUPP is a poet and critic from Little Rock, Arkansas. He works as an mfa candidate and graduate instructor in the Writing Seminars at Johns Hopkins University.

JENNY JOHNSON is the author of In Full Velvet (Sarabande Books, 2017). Her poems have appeared in e New York Times, New England Review, Waxwing, and elsewhere. She is an assistant professor at West Virginia University, and she is on the faculty of the Rainier Writing Workshop.

SYLVIA JONES lives in Baltimore. She is a 2021–22 Stadler Fellow and serves as an associate poetry editor for WEST BRANCH. Her work has appeared in Poet Lore, Shenandoah, e Santa Clara Review, Windfall Room, DIAGRAM, and elsewhere. She earned her mfa from American University in Washington, DC.

OLÉ was born and raised in Ibadan, Nigeria. He is on the mfa in Writing faculty at Vermont College of Fine Arts and is working toward his PhD at Georgia State University. His novel is forthcoming from Amistad/Harper Collins. JANE LEWTY is the author of two collections of poetry: Bravura Cool (1913 Press, 2013), winner of the 1913 First Book Prize in 2011, and In One Form to Find Another (Cleveland State University Poetry Center, 2017), winner of the 2016 csu Poetry Center Open Book Competition. STEVEN LEYVA was born in New Orleans, Louisiana and raised in Houston, Texas. He is author of e Understudy’s Handbook, which won the Jean Feldman Poetry Prize from Washington Writers Publishing House. Steven is an assistant professor at the University of Baltimore in the Klein Family School of Communications Design.

JEAN McGARRY is the author of ten books of ction: No Harm Done, a collection of stories, from Dalkey Archive Press, the most recent, was published in 2019; Blue Boy, a novel, is forthcoming from Jackleg Press.

JILL NATHANSON belongs to the Color Field legacy, but her immersive and sensual paintings stand in a category of their own. Consisting of hues of overlapping layers of variable translucency, they create emotionally nuanced experiences with enough tension to engage our contemplation. Jill Nathanson lives and works in New York.

STELLA N’DJOKU is a Swiss poet, journalist, and educator of Italian and Congolese heritage. Il tempo di una cometa (Ensemble, 2019) is her debut collection. Currently completing her PhD in Philosophy, N’Djoku teaches high school and university students, organizes cultural events, and works with the Italian-language Swiss public-broadcasting organization rsi and the Italian Web Radio Giardino.

HANNAH SANGHEE PARK is the author of e Same-Di erent (lsu Press). She lives in Los Angeles.

JULIA PELOSI-THORPE’s translations of Latin, Italian, and Parmesan poetry appear in the Journal of Italian Translation, Asymptote, Modern Poetry in Translation, e Poetry Society’s e Poetry Review, and more. She can be found at jpelosithorpe.com.

CARL PHILLIPS is the author of en the War: And Selected Poems 2007-2020 (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, and Carcanet/UK, 2022) and the forthcoming prose book My Trade Is Mystery: Seven Meditations from a Life in Writing (Yale, 2022).

ERIN REDFERN’s work has recently appeared or is forthcoming in Rattle, New Ohio Review, New World Writing, and e Massachusetts Review. Her chapbook is Spellbreaking and Other Life Skills (Blue Lyra Press). She teaches poetry classes and workshops online. She can be found at erinredfern.net.

MARY JO SALTER is the author of nine books of poetry published by Knopf, including Zoom Rooms (2022). Her book Nothing by Design was recipient of the 2015 Poets’ Prize. She is a coeditor of e Norton Anthology of Poetry. Salter is Krieger-Eisenhower Professor in the Writing Seminars at Johns Hopkins.

ADRIENNE SU is the author of ve books of poems, most recently Peach State (Pitt, 2021) and Living Quarters (Manic D Press, 2015). Recipient of a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts, she teaches at Dickinson College.

YUKI TANAKA holds an mfa in poetry from the Michener Center for Writers and a PhD in English from Washington University in St. Louis. His chapbook, Séance in Daylight (Bull City Press), was the winner of the 2018 Frost Place Chapbook Contest. He teaches at Hosei University in Tokyo.

STEPHEN TOWNS was born in 1980 in Lincolnville, South Carolina and lives and works in Baltimore. He trained as a painter with a bfa in studio art from the University of South Carolina and has also developed a rigorous, self-taught quilting practice. In 2018, the Baltimore Museum of Art presented his rst museum exhibition, Stephen Towns: Rumination and a Reckoning.

LINDSAY TURNER is the author of Songs & Ballads (Prelude, 2018) and the chapbook Fortnights (forthcoming, Doublecross Press), as well as the translator of several books of contemporary Francophone poetry and philosophy. She is an assistant professor in the Department of English & Literary Arts at the University of Denver.

KOSISO UGWUEZE is an mfa candidate in the Writing Seminars at Johns Hopkins University, where she is managing editor of e Hopkins Review. Her short stories have appeared in Joyland, Gulf Coast, Subtropics, and the South Carolina Review. She lives in Baltimore.

AFAA M. WEAVER was born in Baltimore in 1951 and grew up in the neighborhood now known as Berea. In April 2023, Red Hen Press will publish A Fire in the Hills, his 16th collection of poetry. His several plays include Berea. Afaa is a 2017 Guggenheim fellow.

KAREN WILKIN is a New York-based curator and critic, recently cocurator of e Body in Question at the Painting Center, Chelsea. e author of monographs on Anthony Caro, David Smith, Hans Hofmann, and Helen Frankenthaler, among others, she teaches at the New York Studio School.