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Peggy Shinner (fiction ’94) has a new essay available on the LITHUB website.
What Does it Mean When We Call A Key a “Slave?”
Part of the business of tyranny is to bankrupt certain words of meaning so that they become, in the process, destitute. –Michael Chabon, adapted
Language and its expectations
teaches us
about the relationship
we would have had. –Solmaz Sharif
*
I am in possession of what is known, apparently, as a slave key. The more common, more polite, less charged, and more obfuscating term is valet key. It was handed over in the last in a series of transactions at the car dealership, where Ann and I traded in our old Subaru and bought a new one. This is a moment of ritual, a keenly American scene: the smiling representative of commerce and industry, both smug and deferential, and the giddy new owners, awash in our good fortune. The parties sit opposite, on either side of the desk, which feels like territory successfully traversed; we are in this together (sort of) but adversarial as well: each side out to milk the other for the best terms. The business manager offers up congratulations, not only for the car, gleaming in the lot, but also for the other, unspoken triumph: that with this purchase we have reconfirmed our place in the middle class.
Read the rest of the essay here: What Does it Mean…
Peggy Shinner is the author of You Feel So Mortal, a collection of essays on the body (University of Chicago Press), which was long-listed for the 2015 PEN-Diamonstein-Spielvogel Award for the Art of the Essay. Currently, she is at work on a book about speech and silence.
A new poem by Lucy Anderton (poetry ’05) appears in BOSTON REVIEW.
Synchronized Swim
Read the rest of the poem here: Synchronized Swim
Lucy Anderton’s work has appeared or is forthcoming in Beloit Poetry Journal, Crazyhorse, Fence, The Iowa Review, Tin House, and Verse Daily, and her collection The Flung You was published by New Michigan Press in 2012. She and her partner are raising their daughter Ophélia in the south of France in a 500-year-old structure that has been a hospital, a brothel, and a wartime hiding place.
An essay from Rick Bursky (poetry, ’03) appears in AGNI Blog:
Mirrors
Someone once wrote, “everything I ever learned about myself I learned while looking in a mirror.” Hmmm, interesting. For years I thought it arrogant. Followed by a couple of years thinking it was stupid. For the last few days I’ve thought about it and now I might actually understand. Every morning I brush my teeth while looking at myself in a mirror. Then I shave. Looking in a mirror. Occasionally, I think about what I see. Occasionally, I write about it.
The mirror was invented by accident, or so the story goes. [. . . continue reading here.]
Rick Bursky (poetry, ’03)
Rick Bursky (poetry, ’03) teaches poetry for the Writer’s Program at UCLA Extension. His most recent book, I’m No Longer Troubled By the Extravagance, is out from BOA Editions; the previous book Death Obscura, was published by Sarabande Books. Find out what he’s published in AGNI here.
An essay from Boyce Upholt (fiction, ’16) appears in Roads and Kingdoms:
As soon as we paddled out of Memphis, everything turned green. I had been told it would be like this—wild and quiet and verdant—but still, I was surprised. I thought I knew the local geography; after all, I’ve been driving up and down the nearby stretch of Highway 61 for more than eight years. But when you’re accustomed to tawdry highway gas stations and strip malls, it’s hard to imagine that this kind of quiet, undisciplined greenery persists. [ . . . continue reading here.]
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Dear P.
Please forage please do not achieve please
stay mischievous even if others are deviously
perfect your previous hair color will always be black
black isn’t absence [. . . continue reading here.]
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Dear P.
Please forage please do not achieve please
stay mischievous even if others are deviously
perfect your previous hair color will always be black
black isn’t absence [. . . continue reading here.]
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Victoria Chang (poetry, ’05)
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Victoria Chang‘s fourth book of poems, Barbie Chang, is forthcoming from Copper Canyon Press this fall. Her prior book, The Boss (McSweeney’s) won the PEN Center USA Literary Award and a California Book Award. Other books are Salvinia Molesta and Circle. She was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2017 and teaches at Chapman University and the Orange County School of the Arts. She lives in Southern California with her family. You can find her at www.victoriachangpoet.com.
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An interview with Meghan O’Rourke (poetry, ’05) appears in The Kenyon Review:
. . . to read Meghan’s poem, “Mistaken Self-Portrait as Mother of an Unmade Daughter,” click here.
What was your original impetus for writing “Mistaken Self-Portrait as Mother of an Unmade Daughter”?
I knew I wanted to write a series of poems exploring a big question—the question of what it is to be a person, with an individual consciousness—from the perspective of wanting a child. It’s a very strange thing to bring a being into the world that has no choice in the matter. The longing for a child is rooted in so many discrete physical cravings—for the soft chubby hands of a baby on yours, for the nestling of small, warm, downy head, or for giggling high voices in the other room—but it’s a big existential longing, too. I was interested in writing about what to me are the major, metaphysical, raw questions involved in having children and being pregnant in particular—questions that I think are sometimes minimized in a culture that sentimentalizes child-bearing as a state where you wear white clothes and drink herbal tea and feel dreamy all the time.
. . . to finish reading this interview, click here.
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Poet Meghan O’Rourke (poetry, ’05)
MEGHAN O’ROURKE, a poet and essayist, is the author of three collections of poetry, most recently Sun In Days. The recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship and two Pushcart Prizes, she teaches in the writing programs at NYU and Princeton.
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Poet Maya Phillips (poetry, ’17)
Two poems with audio from alumna Maya Phillips (poetry, ’17) appear in Anomaly 25:
For audio of “The Kindly Ones,” click here.
The Kindly Ones
We at – are interested in taking care of
your real estate needs [we can take this
from you] and it has come to our attention
that, as administrator of the estate of –
[who? will you know him even now?],
you may now be in ownership [you, kin
of your father, in whose image – ?
. . . continue reading here.
. . . for “Theme and Red” and accompanying audio, click here.
A story by Avra Elliott (fiction, ’15) appears in Sweet Tree Review:
Sisters in the Woods
The year she would turn thirteen, Cassie’s parents sat her down to announce their divorce. Her father handed her a Fudgsicle, as though that might soften the news that he was gay and leaving New Mexico to live in New Jersey. He rubbed his nub of a goatee and said, “I’ve always wanted to see the Stone Pony.”
School had let out the day before, and Cassie had been looking forward to weeks of swimming in their small, above ground pool. Instead Cassie rode shotgun beside her mother—who seemed to think imminent abandonment demoted Cassie’s father to the backseat—and dropped her father at the bus station.
Four poems from Amanda Newell (poetry, ’17) appear in Scoundrel Time:
For Adam, my student, in Walter Reed
“Take One!” says the sticky
by the AFG decals,
but I don’t, though I want to,
because—really—
I have no claim to sacrifice,
no stump swinging
. . . continue reading “For Adam, my student, in Walter Reed” and other poems here.