The following is a poem from The Thin Wall, a new collection of poems by faculty member Martha Rhodes.

(Click through to read entire poem).

 

It is the horse in her he fears,

her eyes, large and rolling,

the yellow crunch of her molars,

and her heavy foot aimed at him.

He hears her in the stall of night

approach, the other animals scatter,

as does the dry dirt of her path,

and the pebbles at his feet

as he moves aside, as if to invite her

to enter into the event horizon itself.

He sees all her parts stretch out,

a string speeding forward yet still,

next to him, suspended in the cessation

of time, the galloping fury of her finally

arrested so that now his sleep markedly

quiets enough for the shift of his breathing

to stir her. She licks his salty spine—

he is calm, now—pats his damp mane,

 

Wake little horsey.

 

 

“It is the horse in her he fears” is from The Thin Wall by Martha Rhodes, © 2017. Used by permission of the University of Pittsburgh Press.

An article by fiction faculty member Alix Ohlin appears in AWP: The Writer’s Notebook:

 

“Fiction in the Age of Social Media” by Alix Ohlin, December 2016

The first time I gave a reading, I shared the stage with a writer who introduced herself as “the inventor of the email novel.” Someone in the audience laughed, and she frowned. “It’s just like an epistolary novel,” she explained. “But with email.”

The writer’s tone, proud and defensive, implied that the email novel was a genre with both literary precedent and a bright future of its own.

… continue reading the rest of the article here.

Faculty member Robert Boswell‘s short story “The Soul in Paraphrase” has been published in Ploughshares‘ latest Omnibus collection (purchase a copy here). Following is an excerpt:

Of the several people and one supernatural creature witness to the encounter between priest and sinner, Alas (pronounced Alice) Casher is the most affected. For many years she has known that she exists on God’s earth to redeem the lost, but she has resisted the calling. As long as she possessed a house into which she could retreat, she avoided her duty, baking bread for the church each day to appease her Lord, listening each night for His pronouncements, but avoiding the righteous path by means of books and the insistent bodies of local men, by cable television and the distraction of national politics. Her father, Alasdair Casher, willed the house to the church with the proviso that his daughter could keep it until she married or turned thirty unwed. Today is her birthday, and movers are emptying the place of her material possessions. It is time to accept her vocation. She chooses a summer dress, combs her leonine hair, perfumes her long neck. Bearing the morning’s warm loaves, she enters the cathedral of St. George the Divine to select her destiny.

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An interview with faculty member Monica Youn appears at Prairie Schooner:

1. More than a lot of poets, the form of the poem seems to matter as much of the line itself in your work. I was curious if you feel that about your work, and whether or not that’s a function borne from your prior life as a lawyer?

I think I am, on some level, trying to move from writing poems consisting of exquisite moments stitched together to writing poems with more cumulative and structural force. I’ve been teaching Yeats, and thinking about his movement from a symbolist poetics of sustained intensity to a more drama-inflected poetics of peaks and valleys. This doesn’t mean that each line isn’t important, but just that each line needn’t necessarily call attention to its own importance – a quiet rhythm is still rhythm.

Continue reading online…

Following is an excerpt from the novella “The Exit Coach,” from the story collection of the same name by faculty member Megan Staffel (click through for full excerpt):

At nine AM when the doorman rang and said, “You have a visitor Mr. Abram,” he knew that Jennifer hadn’t canceled. And now the whole tiresome business would begin. Two weeks later, if it lasted even that long, he would decide that his privacy was more important, and feeling like an ass, he would fire the overburdened, underpaid Caribbean, Vietnamese, Puerto Rican woman who had spent an hour on public transportation and then with poor language skills and a volatile mixture of hates and fears, tried her absolute best to understand his needs.

A knock on the door came next. Soft, but he heard it. He had lived by his hearing all of his life and in old age was still blessed with it. It was his legs that had given out.

“It’s open,” he called, wheeling himself into the foyer, preparing to meet the enemy.

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