Poetry
My Rising Prospects
Surely, among dream mammals,
Among man-apes, among ape-apes, among man-men,
Among tasseled, scrubbed, prospecting for hubbub,
Among chyme-free duodena and lipsticked flour,
Among sunchronized twitches and applauded pillows.
Thus embraced and multipated, in my 34th year,
With my dukes up, with my grammar up,
With my legions of fish lips, stapled
To the inner ears, loquacious, murmuring,
With my musical toes and symphonic molars,
With my squatting rights about to be revoked,
“Where are you from? And why are you here?”
With my nose bleeding, with my menarche,
With my mud nap on the hour,
With my rising prospects and descending testicles.Contributor
Linh DinhLINH DINH is the author of a collection of stories, Fake House (Seven Stories Press, 2000), and three chapbooks of poems. He is the editor and translator of Three Vietnamese Poets.
RECOMMENDED ARTICLES
Carolee Schneemann’s Parts of a Body House Book
By Kate SilzerMAY 2021 | Art Books
A new facsimile edition of the performance artist’s feverish exploration of bodily autonomy, sexuality, and creativity. Schneemann passed away in 2019 during the later stages of production. Thus the book is a relic, a temporary vessel for her oeuvre, a pulsing manifestation of something ultimately uncontainable.
Mardon’s Night
by Kjell Askildsen, translated from the Norwegian by Seán KinsellaMAY 2021 | Fiction
Kjell Askildsen published his first collection of stories in 1953. This month, Archipelago Books publishes Everything Like Before, a career-spanning collection from the 91-year-old Norwegian writer. Themes remain remarkably consistent throughout the work: absence, family, memory, and uncertainty. The sensory experience reminds me most of a long still in a Tarkovsky film, maybe a few photographs submerged in a murky stream. The story selected here, “Mardon’s Night,” exemplifies the movement of all relationships, the ebb and flow in the very act of relating, and how our interpretation of another’s subjectivity moves gently, easing its way to understanding. The result is a masterful representation of consciousness.
Kevin Prufer’s The Art of Fiction
By Tony LeuzziJUL-AUG 2021 | Books
As the title of the book suggests, Prufer accomplishes this through an inventive, supple storytelling style that binds memories and hypotheticals to various fictional forms. The bulk of the collection is comprised of poems in which multiple narratives initially run parallel, then gradually angle towards one another and ultimately intersect.
Ander Monson's I Will Take the Answer and The Gnome Stories
By Emma McAleavyMAR 2020 | Books
Most writers are delighted to publish a first book and then a few years later a second—Ander Monson, who admittedly is not much like most writers, has taken to publishing two at a time. His two latest entries into this already formidable oeuvre include a collection of essays, I Will Take the Answer and a book of short stories, The Gnome Stories.
