ISSUES | winter 2000

Jennifer Levasseur Interviewer Rabalais, Kevin Interviewer An Interview With Antonya Nelson Interviewer: You’ve been called a master of the domestic drama because most of your work focuses on problems anchored…    read more

I first encounter Alzheimer’s disease (AD) at the tender age of ten. While sleeping over at the home of my maternal grandparents, in their den, I was suddenly awakened by an apparition.

Bloated from steriods given in the ICU, my father-in-law’s hands lie inert on the sheets of his bed on the fourth floor of a Chicago-area hospital: Hospice Inpatient Unit. Touch those hands and you won’t feel skin, veins, the natural bumps and ridges of knuckles, cuticles, joints.

Maybe it was around the time that the Crips sliced up my brother’s arm for refusing to join their gang. Or it could have been after the Crips and the Bloods shot up the neighborhood one Halloween so we couldn’t go trick-or-treating. It could have even been when my brother’s friend Anthony got shot for being in the wrong place at the wrong time. Whatever the reason, my father decided it was tim to take advantage of a Veteran’s Loan, get out of L.A. and move to the suburbs. Even if I can’t quite nail down the events that spurred the move, I know that one and a half months after I climbed into my father’s rusted-out Buick Wildcat and said good-bye to 110th Street and hello to Verbugo Street, with its lawns and no sidewalks, I fell for my first man.

Featuring the poems: XII. MEDITATION: On the Struggle with the Angel XIII. COMMENTARY: Thirteen Aphorisms on the Nature of Evil DIALOGUE: On the Dream of the Celestial Ladder XXI. COMMENTARY:…    read more

Mention publishing these days and people in the industry, from the writers and agents to those working in book sales and publishing houses, think about consolidation, the blockbuster complex, abandonment of the midlist, the lowest common denominator and the bottom line.

Featuring the poems: Signal Grow Burn Away Motion

Violet began to notice that some of the things she could see out the car window looked a little odd. For instance, she saw a car lying upside down on the east side of the road. One of the doors was cracked open. This by itself would have been strange enough, something you don’t see every day, but after another mile or so, she saw another one.

Hearing the Honda in the valley, he pushed himself to his feet, paused to let his belly receive the pain, then moved stiffly across the dirt yard to the wrought-iron gate. From there he watched the young white man drive the Honda through the stand of tamarind trees on the brow of the hill and bounce along the dusty trail toward him.

In the Midwestern town where I grew up, my father us repainting my room blue and white, my favorite colors, just in case I come home. I try not to think about this. Instead I concentrate on getting a job as an editorial assistant, not knowing any other work for a young graduate to do in publishing in New York.

My mother believed that her entire life would have been somehow different had she been given piano lessons as a girl. She said this often, with a little sigh that made me feel I had better run through my scales one more time.

Interviewer: According to Alfred Knopf’s own remarks, made in a talk in 1949, Alfred got into the business partly by getting to know good bookstores, including a model publisher in…    read more