“Insomnia Poem” by Angela Narciso Torres (poetry ’09), published by Waxwing Literary Journal.
Awake beneath an onyx sky you crack the blinds, inhale
night’s fading ink. The air is your mother’s breath on your skin,
the only steeple is the church of palms in the neighbor’s yard
dropping vermilion fruit on the grass. On another coast,
everyone you know is sleeping except for a boy you love.
[… continue reading “Insomnia Poem” at Waxwing.]
Unique among writing programs, Stanford offers ten two-year Wallace Stegner fellowships each year, five in fiction and five in poetry. All the fellows in each genre convene weekly in a 3-hour workshop with faculty For the 2019-2021 Fellowship, Hieu Minh Nguyen (poetry ’19) joins a legacy of The MFA Program for Writers at Warren Wilson alumni and faculty. Former Stegner Fellows include: Chiyuma Elliott (poetry ’10), Helen Hooper (fiction ’09), Keith Ekiss (poetry ’12) as well as several writers who later became faculty members, including Gabrielle Calvocoressi, Lan Samantha Chang, Stacey D’Erasmo, Kirstin Valdez Quade, Alan Shapiro and Monica Youn.
Congratulations, Hieu!
“Lyme Disease is Baffling, Even to Experts,” an article by Meghan O’Rourke (poetry ’05), published by The Atlantic.
In the fall of 1997, after I graduated from college, I began experiencing what I called “electric shocks”—tiny stabbing sensations that flickered over my legs and arms every morning. They were so extreme that as I walked to work from my East Village basement apartment, I often had to stop on Ninth Street and rub my legs against a parking meter, or else my muscles would begin twitching and spasming. My doctor couldn’t figure out what was wrong—dry skin, he proposed—and eventually the shocks went away. A year later, they returned for a few months, only to go away again just when I couldn’t bear it anymore.
Over the years, the shocks and other strange symptoms—vertigo, fatigue, joint pain, memory problems, tremors—came and went. In 2002, I began waking up every night drenched in sweat, with hives covering my legs. A doctor I consulted thought, based on a test result, that I might have lupus, but I had few other markers of the autoimmune disease. In 2008, when I was 32, doctors identified arthritis in my hips and neck, for which I had surgery and physical therapy. I was also bizarrely exhausted. Nothing was really wrong, the doctors I visited told me; my tests looked fine.
In 2012, I was diagnosed with a relatively mild autoimmune disease, Hashimoto’s thyroiditis. Yet despite eating carefully and sleeping well, I was having difficulty functioning, which didn’t make sense to my doctor—or to me. Recalling basic words was often challenging. Teaching a poetry class at Princeton, I found myself talking to the students about “the season that comes after winter, when flowers grow.” I was in near-constant pain, as I wrote in an essay for The New Yorker at the time about living with chronic illness. Yet some part of me thought that perhaps this was what everyone in her mid-30s felt. Pain, exhaustion, a leaden mind.
One chilly December night in 2012, I drove a few colleagues back to Brooklyn after our department holiday party in New Jersey. I looked over at the man sitting next to me—a novelist I’d known for years—and realized that I had no idea who he was. I pondered the problem. I knew I knew him, but who was he? It took an hour to recover the information that he was a friend. At home, I asked my partner, Jim, whether he had ever experienced anything like this. He shook his head. Something was wrong.
[… continue reading at The Atlantic.]
“Writing Racist Characters,” a critical essay by Sea Stachura (fiction ’19), published by Ploughshares.
I believe it’s time that white authors, and I include myself among them, tell the stories of our racism. Increasingly, we have written and dialogued about embedded racism and multicultural dynamics in our fiction. We often serve on panels about the tricky nature of writing from perspectives beyond our own, or featuring tips on cultural sensitivity and expansiveness in our storytelling, and while I appreciate what these conversations have brought about, there are uniquely white stories that all of us know intimately, and that we aren’t telling: stories of white people perpetrating racism.
Sociologist Robin DiAngelo writes in White Fragility: Why It’s So Hard for White People to Talk About Racism that “white people raised in Western society are conditioned into a white supremacist worldview because it is the bedrock of our society and its institutions.” Additionally, she writes, because white people maintain dominance in our society—operating, for example, all major branches of government and major corporations—we are the only ones who can execute our specific breed of racism. Therefore, the stories of people casually and brutally enacting racism are ours to be familiar with.
Our sensitivity to being called racist or associated with racism is likely what chills any storytelling about it. But Toni Morrison long argued for the importance of this sort of storytelling. In her 1992 book, Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination, she suggests that authors and literary critics consider “the impact of racism on those who perpetuate it.” The narratives of racism’s victims, including slaves, have proved invaluable, “but equally valuable is a serious intellectual effort to see what racial ideology does to the mind, imagination, and behavior of masters.”
Her call is a daring one, even twenty-seven years later, because telling stories in which a protagonist’s racism is the central tension requires, first, that the white author acknowledge and explore their familiarity with racism. The author is responsible for understanding their character’s motivations and worldview, and if the writer can understand this point-of-view, she can’t declare unfamiliarity with it.
A few writers have already begun to tell these stories, not all of them white. “Where Is the Voice Coming from?” by Eudora Welty and “Boys Go to Jupiter” by Danielle Evans are successful in conveying engaging narratives that reveal the protagonist’s racism while neither damning nor apologizing for it. Welty and Evans give the reader fresh eyes with which to see America’s racism and pique an uncomfortable curiosity about its machinations. This speaks to the deeper purpose of literature and to the motivations of these stories: to reflect facets of our world and thus challenge the reader’s assumptions and prejudices. This is work that more of us should be doing.
[… continue reading “Writing Racist Characters” at Ploughshares.]
“Human Technology” by Nomi Stone (poetry ’17), published by Poetry Daily.
Sunlit and dangerous, this country road.
We are follicle and meat and terror and
the machines leave their shells naked on the ground.
One soldier makes a museum in his basement.
Each mannequin in brass, incombustible coats:
I am walking between their blank faces,
their bullets traveling at the speed of sound.
[… continue reading “Human Technology” at Poetry Daily.]
Jenn Givhan (poetry ’15) talks to Angela Narciso Torres (poetry ’09) about overhauling the word “mother,” ideas of empathy poetics, and her new poem, “Lila,” in New England Review 40.2.
Angela Narciso Torres: In a recent interview, you talked about developing your own “poetics of motherhood”—something you explore in your first book, Landscape with Headless Mama, and beyond. In “Lila,” the characters are a mother and a daughter coming of age. While the mother is more of a “supporting character,” she is clearly a huge part of this daughter’s identity—her nurturing, her superstitions and religious beliefs, even her loving chiding at the end—providing a kind of protective shell for the daughter to push against as she comes into her own. How has your own daughterhood, and, more recently, your motherhood changed or influenced your poetics?
Jenn Givhan: I’m struggling to find time to answer these questions (let alone work on any of my writing projects) this summer, as both kids have been home with me all day (I teach online classes from home as an adjunct), and it seems the older they get, the more attention they need. Perhaps there’s something about motherhood poetics encompassed within this dilemma, within the chaos of my fuzz-addled and exhausted mother brain.
In Landscape with Headless Mama, readers might expect that the mother figure is primarily my mom, and that I am primarily the daughter, but this is not the case. Throughout the entire collection there exists blurring of voices and perspectives, and I think that blurring between mother/daughter is what most encapsulates my poetics
[… continue reading “Behind the Byline” as well as “Lila” at the New England Review.]
He places a pillow across my lap,
then lets loose a joke about saving dignity.
He wants to check my scar, and the whole team
descends from their orbit to watch his cold hand
test a red line the length of my stomach
that closes where the stomach had been.
From their fingernail’s slice of cratered moon
they assemble the daily surgical theater
where I come and go, lifting and dropping my gown.
His fingers probe around the plate, reading auguries.
Then like a held breath retreating from stench,
the team deflates, the demonstration ended.
But today, there’s special providence:
the pathology drops like a winged thing
wounded. Like the one I’d found on the patio,
its feet still curled around some absent branch.
The sparrow had the look of a toppled-over
sleepwalker. My hand stuck in protective layers
of thin plastic grocery bags, I was afraid
that what I touched would spark, would wake and fly,
even though that’s what I should have wanted
for it. No readiness can cure that.
It’s okay. I, too, have failed
at the expected, have sputtered
and choked like a rusty valve
in water, have jumped into the pool
only to sink. Little engine, your flawed
machinery is nothing like love. You limp
at last call to the dance floor,
but feel no shame
in your offbeat two-step,
your eleventh-hour shuffle
in a dead man’s shoes.
There’s nothing left
but the encore, so go ahead:
relax, unravel
like a loosened knot. Overripe
fruit in his chest, you blush
with uncertainty, bruise yourself
tender; little heart, tiny treasure,
sweeten to the point of spoil.
With his mind so neatly made up, Richard Peabody never saw them coming. Through the miasma of overpriced petroleum wafting from the gas tank of his dusty Seville, he’d never even considered in his biblically allotted seventy years the prospect of such pure meanness crossing his path a quarter mile from the brick rancher he’d shared with his first and only wife, where last Easter they’d burned their thirty-year mortgage in the hearth. Paying no mind, pumping his premium at the Gas N Go out Highway 9, Peabody, a retired CPA, Braves fan and Presbyterian vestryman, sniffed for his favorite vice from the boiled peanut stand at the parking lot’s crumbled edge. Steam from the cast-iron kettle rose against the curtain of kudzu that choked the scrub woods, the summer’s hatch of insects screamed in the imprisoned shade. Too late, he heard: “Mister, can I ask you something?”
What? Peabody could smell him before he saw him, the lanky youth in the orange jumpsuit, reeking of work crew sweat. No, he didn’t think so. No good came from talking to strangers, young ones at that, who always asked Peabody to buy them beer.
He never saw the second one, only felt the blow from behind. The hose snatched from the tank and wound tight about his windpipe, the gas pumping against his pulse. Their swift hands dug through his suspendered trousers for his keys, loose change, money clip, cellphone, his balls. He drifted into darkness, then came to with a splash of high-test petroleum on his face.
“Tell me, mister, you smoke?”
He couldn’t see a face, only the back of a hand painstakingly tattooed to depict a naked woman struggling in a demon’s claw. The inked hand loomed larger, holding a plastic butane lighter, and he heard the small scraping of the wheel before the world flashed white.
At a station too cheap for security cameras, the sole witness was the black msan in the peanut shack, half-blind with glaucoma, who saw the fatal flash, a fire juggling arms and legs as the Seville fishtailed from the parking lot where what little was left of Richard Peabody lay incinerated.
#
A couple of states later,[1] the Seville sped down the mountain with no headlights—no need, given the monstrous moon overhead, swallowing the stars, lending a ghostly glow to the benighted world below.
Jimmy Bray stretched his scrawny right arm out the window, grabbing fistfuls of empty air, then banged his raw knuckles against the still hot roof of the stolen car. He’d spent the first couple of hours running the electric window up and down and hollering into the fleeting woods until he was hoarse, but he still couldn’t shut up: “You believe that shit? Whumph, man, just like that! Fucked up that fucker real bad.”
All of eighteen, Jimmy Bray had never seen a man burned alive, and it was a sight that had scalded his tender eyes. He hung his head dog-like out the window and gulped free air, trying to get the burnt smell out of his nostrils. He ducked back in and drummed the dashboard. Four hours free and counting. Out of useless habit, he cocked his arm and studied his bare wrist, as if he could tell time from the happy fact that no manacle encircled him yet.
He began to wonder. “We ain’t lost?”
“We ain’t been found.”
Angel didn’t talk much, but you could see the faintest glint of the moonlight on his eyetooth. Homeboy sure had himself some tats, Bray noticed now, ink running up his arm and into the torn sleeve of the orange jumpsuit, exposed brown skin etched not in the seasick green verdigris of most jailhouse art, but a raised filigree of ghostly white welts, a line that looped the wrinkled point of Angel’s elbow, but turned into the maw of a bony face. Shuddering, Bray could swear the demon winked.
With the dashboard dark, he couldn’t see the speedometer or fuel gauge, but Angel evidently could, if only by the feel of the wheel hand over hand, and the squealing complaint of the tires negotiating the corkscrew curves. They must have been running on fumes. No gas station in sight.
“Where the hell are we?” Bray wondered, and the answer flashed ahead—Yonah Fire District—before the metal sign was swallowed in the brilliant shadows cast by the moonlight.
Oncoming high-beams flashed round the curve. Blinded, with bloody floaters across his burning field of vision, Bray craned his neck, following crimson brake lights around the bend. Angel slowed, eying the rearview mirror. One Mississippi, two Mississippi, three—and there, it returned around the rock face, racing down the road with the cobalt lights strobing, the short squawks of the siren.
“Damn, no lights! Turn on the lights!”
But Angel was braking, pulling onto the shoulder, eyes on the mirror as the State Patrol cruiser slipped behind them, then stopped, shooting the high-beams and the side spotlight into their cab. Insects flitted through shafts of white light.
Run, run, Bray was praying. He could see the trooper silhouetted by his own high beams, left hand holding the standard issue flashlight head-high, the right already unsnapping the gun holster.
“Wait, wait,” Angel whispered, hands gripping the wheel, eyes glinting in the mirror. He shifted into reverse.
Bray was flung forward, banging his forehead against the dashboard, then whiplashed like a rag doll against the headrest as their Seville slammed into the grille of the Crown Vic. The advancing flashlight was lost in the crash of chrome and glass and Bray felt a deeper thunk beneath their chassis. The rear wheels began to spin, and a foul burning smell hung in the air. Angel jammed the stick into drive, and there was the sickening thump again, the slight, lifting roll of the tire over the torso of the state trooper.
Angel hit the lights and the tires bounced off pavement through the curve and took the opening in the trees to an overgrown logging road, descending to a cow path, narrowing into a dead creek bed, their headlights bouncing up and down over boulders, like one of the tricked-out lowriders Bray had seen on TV, hopscotching down barrio streets in L.A. But this wasn’t the city, and it was like no country Bray knew. As they pitched headlong into darkness, laurel leaves slapped at the windshield, branches broke, and the glass fractured into a brilliant spiderweb in the moonlight. Angel and his demon-inked arms wrestled with the wheel until the car let out a horrendous metallic scream, the front axle snapped like a twig, and their descent at last halted.
“Fuck me, we’re dead men!”
Bray fell out the door. On the mountainside above, the blue lights were still swinging through the treetops. He scrambled against the dented quarter panel, grabbing for purchase at the flattened tire. It may have been mud, maybe oil, but a warm wetness dripped on his hand from the rear wheel well. Five hours free now, he aimed to get the hell away from Angel Jones, no telling what that dude was liable to do or who next.
Bray began to run into the bright night.
On the Ground
Can you write while you drive?
Hello, windows! Hello, wind! Hello, sour earth smell
and wheels on pavement with wind in my hair.
Good morning, Almedia! Good morning, fifth gear!
Where have you been all this time?
Good morning, water on the shoulder, bayou overflowing.
Good morning, blue sky Norco factory with your fires burning.
Good morning, egrets and herons and crab traps!
Crab traps? Good morning, good morning!
Good morning, LaPlace and roadside okra stands!
Now I’m passing Jacob’s World Famous Andouille and his two-story tall
plywood weenies. Good morning, Michael Taft, and thanks again for the CD
you sent last Christmas. I just found it under the seat—
Look, Ma, no hands! And this CD is called Arma Get It On!
Good morning, intricately carved roadside cross.
Thanks for not being just another couple of sticks
with fake flowers attached. Good morning, chemical clouds
over working refinery! Good morning, knee driving wheel
and ball of Spanish moss tumbling across the road.
Ha! I zipped over you, seventy miles per hour—
and you’re still tumbling across the road behind me!
So what if my husband and I are angry and driving
in opposite directions—is that why the road ahead
dissolves in shiny flecks of chrome and light?
I called Delta this morning. I said, Cancel my flight.
She said, I can’t refund the ticket. I said, Cancel my flight.
Who would let go of the earth at a time like this?
Recovery
For years the trees had no one
to look over them.
Rains followed by drought
followed by floods and other hardships
kept them alone in the cycle
of winter, spring, summer, fall.
Sometimes they shivered
while snow balanced on branches.
Cars drifted past, wide brims of light at night,
not even a glance, and the ground
was absorbed with its own issues
of sun or shade, rain or dew.
Finally from a nearby window came the faces
of two girls and their voices calling to the birds
who sang in the trees, the deer chewing leaves,
the rabbits and squirrels, Quiet, be quiet,
our mother’s sick and she’s sleeping.
Day after day their mother turned
toward the window—awakening.
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