When the manager on duty, Tom Bogan, tells Mary that Bruce Springsteen is coming in and he’s seating him in her section, she’s not at all surprised. Their lives have always been linked and she knew someday they’d meet. She wasn’t just Mary Rosenthal of Freehold, New Jersey (birthplace of Bruce Springsteen), she was the […]
Issue 70
John Hennessy: Matryoshka
This morning the exterminator caught me loafing over a box of old love letters from Sophia, the last thing left to unpack. I liked him so much I had half a mind to share them with him. He marched in smiling and whistling, hoisting his shiny brass gear over his shoulder, a compact and chipper […]
Lynne Barrett: Links
Epilogue: Lynne Barrett writes: “Links,” which was published in 2004, was written about the world of the web as it existed during the dot com boom and bust in 2000-2001. It borrows elements of the form of a website of the period, and has links indicated by underlines but not active. My goal was to […]
Paul Lisicky: New Jersey Notebook: On Writing About Place
1. Early December; snow accumulating on the nose of the jet outside the window. Newark Airport. Too agitated to read, too distracted to eat the muffin I’m about to toss in the trash, I wander about the terminal, looking for something to distract me from the list of cancelled flights on the loudspeaker. And then […]
Stephen Dunn: Imagining New Jersey
New Jersey, of course, has a great tradition of poets, from Philip Freneau, Walt Whitman, William Carlos Williams, Allen Ginsberg up to notable contemporaries like C.K. Williams (born in Newark), Robert Pinsky (from Long Branch), and Gerald Stern and Alicia Ostriker who make their homes in Lamberstville and Princeton respectively. My apologies to other fine […]
Carmine G. Simmons: The last Halloween
. . . I sentimenti che vivono fra le braci di anni sono imbottiti nelle borsette di vergogna e di paura. Urbano Giordano, Disfare il Momento Fire always seems like autumn no matter what season it may flare in places where flames don’t make sense: warm luminaries set on holiday snow; a clam-bake on the […]