Issue 98

Image issue #98 includes poems by critic, activist, and biblical scholar Alicia Ostriker, winner of the Jewish National Book Award and many others. She has said, “Composing an essay, a review or a piece of literary criticism, I know more or less what I am doing and what I want to say. When I write…

This Is the Ritual: Stories Rob Doyle Bloomsbury, 2017 The Things We Do That Make No Sense: Stories Adam Schuitema Northern Illinois University Press, 2017 ONE OF THE MOST STUBBORN MYTHS of modernity is the notion that religion is something you believe rather than something that you do. Religion as a “belief system” was the…

IN ONE OF HIS MONOLOGUES about the fictional Minnesota town of Lake Wobegon on the Prairie Home Companion radio show, Garrison Keillor relates: It’s a good time, winter, for all of us. It’s a time when all the things that we’ve been postponing for months can now be put off for a good while longer.…

ONE RADIANT FALL MORNING about eight years ago, I needed to revise some poems before I sent them to editors. I approached my desk armed with questions I ask my students: Is the language alive? Check out the metaphor. Does the poem make an argument or take the reader on a journey? I am a…

Amit Majmudar, a poet and novelist, once called himself “the servant of two masters,” and indeed, he has published both verse and fiction to critical acclaim. The Poetry Society of America selected his collection 0˚, 0˚, published in 2009, as a finalist for the Norma Faber First Book Award, and A.E. Stallings awarded his second…

When the floor collapses, it’s time to make an act of faith.                                    Dominique de Menil Saint Gregory said the body is just an ill-proportioned building. It is unwelcoming: a windowed room with a wood table and fluorescent lighting. A poverty of meaning in doors and feasts; they are merely nonverbal expressions for what…

What is the difference in weight between two stones. One drowns you, the other is a trifling inconvenience. Any discrepancy measures roughly the width of a tongue. Who deserves even a dram of such mercy if every promise is a mistake in translation. For example, say sin, and everyone’s interpretations vary greatly. But, I remain…

A cloud floats in a pool that turns like a slow clock, helping these insects slide from birthing shucks. * Duns roil the surface, twitch and flutter, a newborn or paralytic who believes he can rise and walk again, if only the wind would command him. * Halos drift around red and blue spots that…