language

I never knew my lola. Every few months, I would hear her voice crackle through the phone from the other side of the Earth.  On the mantel, I would see…

Alternately mellifluous and discordant, Parker Tettleton’s This Is A City (Ravenna Press) is as much an act of listening as it is writing. Or, to put it another way, there’s…

2.5 mg) This is not a tale of transformation, nor of trauma. The past and future keep splitting away, like cloven wood. Even the present—that urgent word, a disheveled storm—can’t…

“Where’re you going?” Mom called sharply from the kitchen. “Aren’t you going to help me?” I stopped, one foot on the stairs. My eyes were bleary, my temper suddenly short.…

[Photo by Liena Vayzman, Untitled Self Portrait (Eye to Eye), 2018.] By Liena Vayzman   1. Anagram of Alien 2. Rhymes with Siena or Vienna. Take your choice: the sun-saturated South…

Snow Days. They’re legendary. Mythical. Great, white unicorns or whales we chase in our sleep, wake up wishing we had caught or had caught us in the eye of their…

By Logan February   A name is something given, passed like a note that was never meant to be read because the receiver already knows what it says. But I…

In a shaft of morning light, my daughter discovers an eddy of dust motes. Those she says, pointing to what without the sun would be unseen. She runs through them…

There is a small party who are actually of this opinion and who try to show us that, if any law exists, it can only be this: The Law is…

Like other bookish types, I ended up an English major in college. Many of my fellow English majors wanted to teach, but that didn’t appeal to me at all; the…

Photo taken in 2008 in Gałów, Lower Silesia, with my grandmother, Jadwiga Chabsińska née Wilczyńska, shortly before her death. On the art of feeling lonely in language and feeling less-lonely…

By K[EI] Kaimana Art by Kristen Stone Note: This contrapuntal poem is best read on screen sizes with a width of 770 pixels or greater. Smaller screen sizes may rearrange lines into…

How to account for, much less explain, America’s malaise? Is it that our politics lack imagination, or that our imaginations too easily give into the temptations of ostensibly ideology-free escapism?…

Dictionary of Untranslatables: A Philosophical Lexicon, edited by Barbara Cassin Translation edited by Emily Apter, Jacques Lezra, and Michael Wood Princeton University Press, 2014 1344 pages – Princeton / Amazon   Strictly…