ISSUES | spring 2024

Invasive Species  We couldn’t decide between killing lionfish or common starlings. Harry voted for lionfish because spearfishing them would require a trip to Florida, a place on the map contrary…    read more

The Poet Translates the Cryptic Text He Sent in a Fever from the Camino de Santiago Trail When I said the longest day of the year, I meant not solstice…    read more

How To Love Animals  We never planned to get goats. In fact, we’d told ourselves that goats were off limits. My wife, Anna, and I were living in the middle…    read more

A Conversation with Carl Phillips  Carl Phillips is the author of sixteen books of poetry, most recently Then the War: And Selected Poems 2007-2020 (Carcanet, 2022), which won the 2023…    read more

The Regal Azul  They were somewhere over the Atlantic, south of the Grand Bahama, but beyond that, Lang couldn’t say. This absurd cruise ship, outfitted with every form of entertainment…    read more

Semicolon People  If I spent four years in medical school, I’d want people to address me as “Doctor,” so I call my new psychiatrist “Dr. Reagan” even though my friend…    read more

My Cape Disappointment  It was named by a British fur trader who’d been looking for the mouth of the Columbia River. Dejected, the fur trader gave up the search, tacked…    read more

The Birds  In the middle of watching Alfred Hitchcock’s The Birds with my family in our basement TV room, circa 1969, when I was nine, I was sent to the…    read more

from “My Heart and the Nonsense”  “Oh heavens, all the lives one wants or has to lead.”  —Robert Lowell, in a letter to Elizabeth Bishop I. Before I longed to…    read more

After Birth  This winter in southwestern Colorado we had snow and cold for months. Three-degree mornings in February, March, even into spring. We don’t like the cows calving in icy…    read more

Walk, I    After a mile or so arthritis begins to tighten my back  and I start trudging, walking to keep on walking,   which is what you have to do.…    read more

Face Off: Anti-Portraiture in Contemporary Art Pablo Picasso’s 1906 Cubist painting Portrait of Gertrude Stein, considered the archetype of anti-portraiture, was created out of frustration and anger. Day after day, in…    read more

Love and Work: Three Biographies of Artistic Power Couples Her Husband: Hughes and Plath–A Marriage, by Diane Middlebrook. Viking, 2003, 361 pp., $25.95 (hardcover) Truly, Madly: Vivien Leigh, Laurence Olivier,…    read more