The Brooklyn Rail

I’ve followed John Domini’s fiction since judging him winner of Boston University’s undergraduate writing prize in the 1970s. He steadily progressed, publishing story collections, novels, poetry, and criticism. In my favorite, Movieola!, he not only had fun with meta-fictional ironies, but rose to flashes of poetry, as in “Assassins: Story Board to Date,” when his Hollywood pitchman imagines assassins in love: “For the two of them every orgasm’s as distinct and gorgeous as a snowflake.” For a while, we both lived in Watertown. We shared the same birthday. I bought his Plymouth with its 100,000 miles. His first review in the Boston Globe was of Ploughshares. We kept track. Most recently, as he visited his mother in Cambridge, we met at the Plough and Stars, and he had me sign my latest, which he’d bought at the Grolier. RIP, John.