Issue 86

This November, the pears are as hard as wood but taste like the honeysuckle I used to pick from the chain-link fence in the alley, nipping the end and drawing the stamen out, slowly, until that one sweet drop beaded at the bottom—one of the houses is wild with honeysuckle. When I came to You…

You believe He’s stronger than the desert wind butting against the fence, wind that ignites sagebrush, tears through the hills and strips the houses to ash. Despite your lips that crack till blood comes, skin that grows rough between your fingers, you believe He will be solid to your touch the way the bay is…

Lord of worn stone cliffs and the guileless trill          of the canyon wren; Lord of stunted hemlocks, imperiled mussels, seeds that fall on shallow soil;          Lord of boreal forests, of the fragile nitrogen cycle, of vanishing aquifers, spreading          deserts; Lord of neglect and…

Holy Week again:             unleavened sky, all tensions held past hold. Mostly, what I feel is the unlikelihood. These days, pick a miracle,             there’s science to explain it. Say it’s nighttime in the Garden, Jesus praying in a bloody sweat: Hematidrosis—rare; not unknown—            …

Fair Quiet, have I found thee here, And Innocence, thy sister dear! Mistaken long, I sought you then In busy companies of men; Your sacred plants, if here below, Only among the plants will grow. Society is all but rude, To this delicious solitude.  Meanwhile the mind, from pleasure less, Withdraws into its happiness; The…

Let’s Talk About Love by Carl Wilson (Bloomsbury Academic, 2014) Writing the Record by Devon Powers (University of Massachusetts Press, 2013) ( ) by Ethan Hayden (Bloomsbury Academic, 2014)   AROUND THE TIME I started getting paychecks for writing about music, I tried to read the dense and difficult Aesthetics of Rock by the rock-critic-cum-philosopher…

MY MOTHER’S FIRST PRAYER was by phone, with a call-center employee from a Toronto Christian TV show. My mother was at a difficult moment in her life—health not good, family on another continent, a small child in her sole care. When she saw the show’s smiling, boyish host, she decided that he was an idiot and,…

To SSA and TBA AT TIMES I TELL MYSELF that the difference between me today and me a decade ago can be summed up by the fact that where I was once a devoted fan of U2, I am now a partisan of Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds. I treat it as a joke, but…

Li-Young Lee’s books of poetry include Rose (1986), winner of the Delmore Schwartz Memorial Poetry Award; The City in Which I Love You (1990), which was a Lamont Poetry Selection; Book of My Nights (2001), which won the William Carlos Williams Award; From Blossoms: Selected Poems (2007), and Behind My Eyes (2008). His other work…

The role or purpose of art in our lives is to serve as a reminder. We have a sense that the world of perception is illusive and created. Through the acceptance of the gifts of beauty we feel that we are able to draw back the veil cast over our senses, if only briefly, and…