Issue 75

A big thanks to one-half of Over the Rhine, the pianist, bassist, and songwriter Linford Detweiler, for participating in our reader interview–and to our Imagereaders for their thoughtful, funny, and off-the-wall questions. You can read the jumping-off point for this interview, Linford’s reflection on the word human from issue 75, here.    What was your first thought when you sat down…

The sky clears like a good idea for a few blue hours sprung between industrial grays; it lures me out for a walk, unfurled and pumping, loose beyond my neighborhood. A child is taking advantage of the weather of expansion. He kneels on patchy lawn, kid businesslike, a box of wares and quick for sale…

In high-school Latin, I first read Augustine and wary could not, even threatened by grades, be made to care for his florid rhetoric or thieving of pears. Uphill I trudge from the Antonine baths Augustine must have known. The basement remains where puddles reflect fallen columns, their leafy capitals upside down. A corner maquette under…

Hold up your palms to the darkness little one; be pierced with light. Come here for what, for irony and progeny, short years of rising up and passing on? As if there were an end to transience, as if it could ever pass for shelter or resting place. Reason is lost upon such reasonableness when…

Freedom by Jonathan Franzen (Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2010) The Marriage Plot by Jeffrey Eugenides (Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2011) The Pale King by David Foster Wallace (Back Bay Books, 2011)   Strangeness and oddity will sooner harm than justify any claim to attention, especially when everyone is striving to unite particulars and find at least some general…

An oyster-white lily, inner walls of plaster, the stoma lit like an orange candle, the petals’ undersides like the satin trim on lingerie, or a corrugated fan. White as a cloud cornice, egg shell, whitish spiders just visible on petal-skin of nearly the same color— the description untenable, improbable to the eye, the stillness never…

My grandfather moonlighted as a rabbi on Friday evenings when he should have been praying in the Bronx one-room apartment with no electricity and the claw-foot tub used for distilling whisky— not walking down 143rd Street below the globed gaslights, along the trolley tracks, past shuttered tobacco shops and Coca-Cola signage, towards Yonkers and the…

Luci Shaw is attentive to balance, cultivating both an active engagement with the arts in culture and the solitude necessary to listen and catch at language. Her twelve acclaimed collections of poetry include What the Light Was Like, Harvesting Fog, and the forthcoming Slow Pleasures. Her nonfiction includes Breath for the Bones: Art, Imagination, and…

I sing for fear I’ll hear the still small voice and not like what it says. I croon to make my skull full as a squat hive and the honey is my cracked song, my sting in the throat. O I know a bee is not a melody but I must come to terms with…

Because the crab apple tree is not incarnate, but a shape cut from sky, you simply pull its trunk a little wider and step through. Once on the other side, you turn, take stock, lean on a bough, and look back at it all. So strange to catch your own life unawares, to see your…