The New Republic

The massive, grimy river shouldered its waytoward the harbor. I stood under the ruckus of sky.The wind plucked awnings, plastic bags, newspapersand sent the news twirling over corduroy waters.I’d meant to see art, but the plan miscarried.A guitarist stationed in a doorway bent his headto rasp his ballad into the wind’ssore throat. Rainlight glossed the guitar stringsand played its own tune, this city such a storm of wants.“You have a right to your actions, READ MORE >>

You fell into it like someone falling through a doorand found yourself in a cozy nightmare of spotlights,naked onstage in a tiny theater where the audiencewore masks and wasn’t above slapping you around. Your performance was subject to criticism from the start,your size and shape and every breath you took measuredagainst an impossible ideal that would be the first of many,the graded assessment gentle at first, isn’t he cunning, only to gain rigor over time, Son, if you don’t shoot READ MORE >>

                                                                                                                          A VersionToday is Sunday.Today, for the first time, they let me go out into the sun.And I stood there I didn’t move,struck for the first time, the very first time ever:how far away from me the sky is                           how blue it is                           how wide.I sat down, in respect, in awe, I sat down on the ground,I leaned my back against the wall. READ MORE >>

The one book where we never lose our place spreads its covers to a gooseflesh Braille. We are bookmarks slipped into each other. In that book, we read each night of a couple who go without touching for hours on end; then, the dishes put away, the toddler powered down and set to charge for tomorrow, they thumb a lock and make a greenhouse where once there was a master bedroom. Orchids push open the drawers. Honeybees bother the reading lamp. The carpet threads itself with grass READ MORE >>

I wish my father was here. His features were calm and striking, even when his breaths were horrible. Remote pale yellow sunlight behind a screen of clouds. Landscape in darkness. Rain comes straight down in dense strands that cover the street with rain froth. The trees are so full it makes everything seem constant but fragile, as if any moment could be the last. All the news is the same news: somebody bombing somebody, somebody cheating somebody, READ MORE >>

In the world of letters, there’s prolific and there’s W.S. Merwin. The former Poet Laureate has written twenty-six books of poetry in the last six decades and has still found the time to translate twenty-two books of other people’s poems. The translations are so voluminous, and the source languages so varied—from Japanese to Swedish, from Sanskrit to Crow—that you would expect a selection of his translations to be an opus of world literature, a small window into a pre-Babel world. READ MORE >>

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The Song of Achilles: A Novel  by Madeline Miller READ MORE >>

SOUTH KOREA HOLDS its presidential elections today, and given North Korea’s brinkmanship last Wednesday when it launched a surveillance satellite—widely seen as a step toward greater nuclear capability—Americans would be wise to watch. READ MORE >>

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