A poet, Christle is pleasingly roving and idiosyncratic as she assembles and parses, ponders and distills the science of tears, the length of a cry, Sylvia Plath, elephant emotions, Ovid, Kent State, Ross Gay, Silas Mitchell, and the Bas Jan Ader film, I’m Too Sad to Tell You (among other things) into miniature packets of white-space interrupted prose.

After three decades, I was going to summon the courage to return to camps and to witness this story that I had lived, and to see how it had changed, and to let it ignite my memories so that I could say something important and helpful.

“So who mothers the motherswho tend the hallways of mothers, the spill of mothers, the smell of mothers, who mend the eyes of mothers” –Catherine Barnett, “Chorus” On Easter, I go to my son’s father’s house—Sundays are one of his days—and watch my son enjoy his basket, which I spun from thin air the night…

The Swedish crime writer Henning Mankell died October 5, 2015. He was sixty-seven years old. Mankell was diagnosed with cancer a year ago during a trip to the orthopedic surgeon. Mankell thought he had a slipped disk. Turned out he had tumors in his neck and lung. The cancer had spread. Henning Mankell wrote plays,…