Mariko Nagai’s work has received fellowships from the Rockefeller Foundation Bellagio Center, UNESCO-Aschberg Bursaries for the Arts, Yaddo, to name a few. She has received the Pushcart Prizes both in poetry and fiction. Nagai’s collection of poems, Histories of Bodies, won the Benjamin Saltman Prize from Red Hen Press. Her first collection of stories, Georgic: Stories, […]
Contributors 81
Laura McCullough
Laura McCullough’s most recent books of poetry are Rigger Death & Hoist Another, Panic, and Speech Acts. She is the editor of two anthologies, The Room & the World: Essays on the Poet Stephen Dunn, Syracuse University Press, fall, 2013, and Poetry and Race: the Task of Un/masking, University of Georgia Press, spring, 2014. She […]
Chuck Kruger: An Ontological Answer
Why am I standing here with my back to the wind watching the rafters be raised? Me of the wobbly legs. Me of the valium eyes. I’m maybe good to carry nails, fetch the four-foot level, to and fro, to and fro. Little dinky things. Why am I standing anywhere watching anyone work? A year […]
Elizabeth Thorpe: William Tell
Tell me, William, was it worth it? Do you remember the long shadows in that square, the way your shoes scuffed on the cobblestones, the way the multitudes cowered at the perceived authority of one man? Not you. You walked on by. So many of us work and work to make a legacy, but when […]
Catherine Parnell: Sirens
My father calls twice from the small hospital in our town – the first time he says: “They are working on her.” The second time, less than three minutes later, he says: “Your mother is dead.” I tell him to stay where he is, that I will come and get him, that he can’t drive […]
Mariko Nagai: How We Touch the Ground, How We Touch
As usual, another season of betrayal must follow the harvest. During the harvest, we are safe. On the field, we whisper half a phrase and hum fragmented sounds of words amongst us, messages of the Carpenter-Son hidden in broken phrases of weather and harvest. We bend our backs to cut the stalks, huddling as close […]