Richard Hugo "We won’t all disappear on a remote country road in the Monroe Valley, but like The Admiral and his wife we are all going into the dark. Some of us hope that before we do we have been honest enough to scream back at the fates. Or if we never did it ourselves, that someone, derelict or poet, did it for us once in some euphonic way our inadequate capacity for love did not deny our hearing." “…I’ve seen the world tell us with wars and real estate developments and ba

by Tony Hoagland Maybe that is what he was after, my father, when he arranged, ten years ago, to be discovered in a mobile home with a woman named Roxanne, an attractive, recently divorced masseuse. He sat there, he said later, in the middle of a red, imitation-leather sofa, with his shoes off and a whisky in his hand, filling up with a joyful kind of dread-- like a swamp filling up with night, —while my mother hammered on the trailer door with a muddy, pried-up stone, the

I am asking the difficult question. I need help. I’m not asking from ill will. I have no desire to see you coping Or not coping with unmanageable coils Of a problem frivolously called up I’ve read your books, had glimpses of a climate That is rigorous, though not too hard For the spirit. I may have grown Since reading them; there is no scale To judge by, neither is the soul Measurable. I know all the tropes Of religion, how God is not there To go to; how time is wha

by Denis Johnson (read by Nic Wednesday, August 27) the man Himself We mourn this senseless planet of regret, droughts, rust, rain,...