I am keenly aware that I look suspicious—a woman wearing a Tyvek moonsuit and waders, juggling a stack of steel posts, fuchsia survey tape, and a rubber mallet. Pickup truck drivers give me you’re-not-from-around-here looks; so do occasional leisure boaters, who I hope to Jesus are not eating any fish from this river. The Bainbrydge River is sluggish, a sulfury, over-hard-boiled-egg green. My steel gauges suck right down into its bottom.
Read More - Silent Impacts
My mother started calling me about a year and a half ago. She is in her late eighties and suffers from cognitive decline, so she does not remember that we haven’t had a relationship for more than twenty-five years. Despite her memory struggles, she figured out my home number and leaves messages on it. The first one, transcribed to include her pauses, looks like poetry:
Read More - Searching for the Duck Hole
After my daughter’s birth in 2002, there were nights I sat in the rocking chair next to her crib, understanding that the world would be better if I killed myself. And her. I’d grip the arms of the chair and flex every muscle in my body to stop myself. One night, I walked into the room where her father was reading and sat on the edge of the bed beside him. I admitted I had no feelings—for him, for her, for myself—but that we could be friends; we could raise her together. We’d be fine. Our lives would be fine.
Read More - Transparent
For Savich, there is no difference between that which is learned in the world and the learning that can happen in a poem; the one aids the other and vice versa.
Read More - Diving Makes the Water Deep
The philosophical attitude of existentialism so perfectly fits our time, you’d think it was invented for us.
Read More - Surfing with Sartre
In this timely book, Matthew Baigell examines cartoon images of Jews published in mainstream American magazines in the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries.
Read More - The Implacable Urge to Defame: Cartoon Jews in the American Press, 1877-1935
My family didn’t move to these places, but their shapes, their possible breaths, bumped against my own history, my immediate future, parallel universes that might suddenly rope around my present, palpitating self.
Read More - A History of Nomadism
Deep Salt Water is neither political nor didactic; rather, it is a text that transcends genre and uses the ocean and the life that exists within it as a lexicon for the necessary act of forgiveness.
Read More - Deep Salt Water
We were going to visit Budapest for a vacation. “As long as we’re there, we could visit your grandmother’s village,” he said. “Maybe do a little research. You might find a family member who still lives there.”
Read More - The Grammar of Untold Stories
Collectively, Auker’s essays and prose poems describe both the prying loose of norms that have structured her life and the emergence of a vibrant woman who seeks out wild places.
Read More - Ordinary Skin: Essays from Willow Springs