Adaptation
By Essay Issue 93
I’M AT A LAKE IN WEST VANCOUVER, British Columbia. At least I think it’s a lake. It could be a sound, or an inlet, or a bay. In any case, it’s a body of water, and with the evergreens and sizable rocks lining the shore and covering the smaller land masses across from us, against…
Read MoreTentatively, Religion
By Poetry Issue 91
What! Did the Hand then of the Potter shake? —Rubaiyat The kick wheel turns against the spondees of her feet —clop-clop—upon the floor: amorphous clay shines like a seal’s skin. We are uncarved blocks, says the Tao. Hum-hum, says the wheel. And I am Yahweh at dust, she says, her hands tucked and carving…
Read MoreMerton Recites a Mantra
By Poetry Issue 91
Resurrection is the layout of keys on which I tap. Quite abstruse, this keyboard of thoughts. But I repeat it so often I almost have them beat. From one layer of the mind to the next to the furthest words leap, strands of idea return again as if a sink has clogged. Still by some…
Read MoreEat this Scroll: The Saint John’s Bible and the Word Made Flesh
By Essay Issue 53
ACTION!” the director shouts, and I slip on the headphones to watch another take. But my mind begins to wander from video village—parlance for the monitors where we sit on set—to a faraway village in the countryside of Wales. As a writer and producer on a brand new, star-studded, one-hour drama, I should be more…
Read MoreSecond Attempt at Elegy for Anthony Piccione
By Poetry Issue 62
Last night I climbed once more the narrow ladder of my poems. I took my fine pen and turned paper into ash. What were you turned into? What did you become, after? Once you said that to write a poem is to touch the unseen. If I have touched the unseen, it has not been…
Read MoreA Conversation with Robert Clark
By Interview Issue 78
Robert Clark was born in Saint Paul, Minnesota. He received a BA in English from the University of California, Berkeley, and an MA in medieval studies from the University of London. He is the author of ten books, both fiction and nonfiction. Clark’s first collection of personal essays, My Grandfather’s House, was a finalist for…
Read MoreCarnal Beauties: The Art of Allison Luce
By Essay Issue 80
CERAMICIST ALLISON LUCE makes biomorphic portraits that seem almost excessively beautiful. Each piece revels in its physicality, its undeniable materiality, in its earthy substance—clay—and organic forms. Her four-part Serpent Tree series serves as an apt introduction to her work. In Primoris Ortus, for example, assemblages of swelling, vegetative curves stand alongside works suggestive of eroded rock…
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