Issue 79

Chickasaw poet, essayist, and fiction writer Linda Hogan’s essay in the Image issue 79 is a lyric meditation on the migration of sandhill cranes and their connection to the Platte River in Nebraska. It explores the links between the natural world and human making—and sets forth a way of standing in awe before nature.    Image: The…

Without Sanctuary Aftermath and Visions in Contemporary American Fiction What Happened to Sophie Wilder by Christopher R. Beha (Tin House Books, 2012) Enon by Paul Harding (Random House, 2013) I Want to Show You More by Jamie Quatro (Grove Press, 2013) THE SPONTANEOUS and unremembered wanderings of an amnesiac are often called a fugue state. But the word…

O I say these are not the parts and poems of the Body only, but of the Soul, O I say now these are the Soul! —Walt Whitman By the second week in September nuthatches capture the last elderberries, excrement purpled and extravagant, sprayed drunkenly across my truck’s hood. I’ve been thinking about the God…

He is walking across a field of wheat in Kansas, grain as tall as his shoulder and as tan as his face. He is cupping his hands to his mouth, shouting words the wind steals and throws into the air like chaff. I need to know what he’s said and begin chasing his voice as…

I’M WAITING for the 6:40 am train to take me to Boston. It’s a forty-five minute ride that I use to read “inspirational” works. What’s inspirational? Anything that helps get me through the day with some kind of inner peace, with a sense that what I’m doing is worthwhile. I take a deep breath as…

after “The Sunflower: On the Possibilities and Limits of Forgiveness” by Simon Wiesenthal I All day I’ve been beating my breast, begging pardon of those I’ve offended: family, estranged friends, and ex-dates. Cleaning the slate, the Rabbi calls it each erev Yom Kippur. I’ve even emailed that asshole out west with the broad-brim hat and…

Somebody said, “Lift that bale.” THE EPIGRAPH to Leonard Cohen’s second novel, Beautiful Losers, is attributed to “Ray Charles singing ‘Ol’ Man River.’” Not to Oscar Hammerstein, who wrote the lyrics, but to one of the song’s many singers. This was back when Cohen was known primarily as a novelist and poet, before he had performed…

Years ago somebody decided—I don’t know how this conclusion was reached—that the most beautiful phrase in the English language was cellar door. —Don DeLillo, interviewed in the Paris Review, 1993 i. cellar door / cellar door ———————–Two solid wooden doors hinged to open out leaning on a sloping ledge against the house. Within, a wooden…

WHEN THE RED SUN is sinking behind the mist in the evening, the sandhill cranes begin to arrive. Long-legged, wings open wide, they come first sparely, two watchers, then in scatterings and finally in great numbers, lines of them crossing the sky to land before us hidden humans. The great birds fly across the mist,…

Today I saw a man who looked away when he asked the clerk where he might find pepper- corn sauce in a packet. He held a muscled bit of stringy steak. Both man and meat had the gray look of shades swept from a cave. Sent to aisle three, the man wandered, head down, on…