Articles

I sometimes think back to my youth Remembering the heavy sack of sin on my shoulders And I bent double so it seemed Across the fields, with scarecrows hung on crosses, Along straight roads that led to nowhere, Weighed down in ditches, barns, the hollow trees I slept in; And how I searched like a…

Prayer means shedding of thoughts. ——————–—Evagrius Ponticus My heaven is a stripping of the mind. I make this glittering desert be a desert The burning rock, rock, blue sky just sky Until they are pristine; but then I find The desert leads me to its opposite Noise-vomiting Constantinople, And sky reminds me of the boundless…

An old Jewish tradition, dating back to the Talmud, records that the world is sustained by the presence of at least thirty-six tzaddikim. These people do their good deeds quietly: their neighbors do not know who they are. If, however, that minimum of truly saintly people does not exist, then the world itself will perish.…

The following excerpt is from the novel A Blessed Snarl, forthcoming from Breakwater Books in 2012.   THE WEATHERMAN’S HAND sweeps from Labrador down Newfoundland’s fanged north coast to Saint John’s, his finger squiggling from there down to Renews: the sea white against green land. He’s talking about winds rifling in from the north. The…

Sound with the cries of Rachel’s children. Moan over empty hillsides and river runnels, among the broken stones of abandoned streets and fallen fences, through empty channels and sharp-ledged ravines resonant with echo. Rasp and rattle with the integrity of a perfect reckoning down the metal roof onto the splash pans of gutters, down the…

A weaver, this spider, she plays her eight thin black legs and their needle-nail toes across the threads faster, more precisely, than a harpist at concert can pluck the strings in pizzicato. Although blind at night, she nevertheless fastens a thread to a branch of chokecherry on one side of the path, links it to…

Although preparation for this article began in 2008, by the time it was completed Guy Chase had begun to lose his fight with cancer. He approved a near-final draft a few months before slipping away in his sleep on August 18, 2011, at the age of fifty-six.   I am for an art that grows…

On an island in the disputed region of the Yellow Sea, blooms of smoke from the shelling of the garrison weave into one bloom, one force of nature so thick, they say, you cannot see your hands. The planet, we know, tilts on its axis like a man contemplating a problem, spun toward the horizon…

As he raises my bookshelf, empty now, and therefore heavy with what I do not know, my friend the carpenter speaks so kindly of all the dark acolytes of one god who walk the streets of ground zero in fear, beneath the shadows and mistrust that pour down the highest places like waterfalls of dust.…

The following excerpts are from the novel Glorybound, forthcoming from WordFarm Press in 2012.   Aimee THE LEMLEY SISTERS had decided they would drive to the prison on the first Monday in August, but on that morning, Aimee woke with bad pain. It was still dark, not yet five. She peeled off her blanket and…