The Literary Review articles from January 1999

The Literary Review archives from January 1999

Glacier.(poem)
January 1, 1999... They were, let's say, a couple we once knew (though mostly what we knew was what we read in newspapers, where daily the story changed), and we were following their red Mercedes convertible home from a rather elegant party ...

"Making His Muscles Work For Himself": An Interview with David Henry Hwang.(Asian-American playwright)
January 1, 1999... Raised in a wealthy Los Angeles suburb by a first generation, Chinese American fundamentalist Christian family, David Henry Hwang wrote and directed his first play, F.O.B. (slang for "fresh off the boat"), which explores the tensions within and...

Revisions: Imogene Cunningham at Ninety.(poem)
January 1, 1999... She had seventy years of images inside her head and closet the year she won a grant to print some negatives she'd never seen on paper, only in the darkroom's wet and partial light. Her helper found glass negatives that she'd...

Bound Feet.(poem)
January 1, 1999... Golden lilies, golden lotus, the Chinese called the feet of noble women, bound with silken bandages when they were four or five, toes drawn into the soles, curving "like the new moon," one admiring Emperor said. Once, at...

Landscapes and Architectures.(poem)
January 1, 1999... 1 we feed on the twilight corner shadows those five-thirty a.m. illusions that turn the hallway into a mansion, my apartment into a city, the city into a continent, the continent into your eyes and other ...

Counting Hawks.(poem)
January 1, 1999... They glide in slow circles above the fields of dry September corn, dark eyes corkscrewing down to catch the flicker of mouse or squirrel out foraging this morning. We've watched them for hours, my son and I, since crossing...

October.(poem)
January 1, 1999... October: nut and apple of the months, ruins of a gilded architecture, your ripeness gleams in the last sheaves. Your airy flesh, wing unfurled, fluttering cold plumage, a huge bird, hunted and served in a...

What We Come To.(poem)
January 1, 1999... I'm running late as usual and the news from everywhere is bad, but there's your letter on the kitchen table and I just have to see again how calligraphy weighs momentum, how first thing each morning you track down...

Taxi.(short story)
January 1, 1999... In the back seat of the Volkswagen Beetle, the woman, her baggy eyes shut, chants the Lord's Prayer over and over. She's sitting in between The Monkey, who has a simian arm casually draped over her shoulder, as if he were her boyfriend, and...

Edges.(poem)
January 1, 1999... 1. The older I get the more I prefer sharp clean edges. Shapes that do not merge with other shapes, reds that maintain their distance from blues. The stiff breeze that trims the fat from August afternoons....

When I Bury My Face in the Crimson Velvet.(poem)
January 1, 1999... It's not just the faint musk of rose or how my skin smelled, moving against another body but a Xerox of a Xerox of a strange woman's sweat, some whore in a shadowy room in a basement in China, bent over these...

Shoes.(poem)
January 1, 1999... Magic, these little boats we sail, riding perilous tides. "Nor can foot feel, being shod," Hopkins claims, but the bound foot feels too well the torturer's whim, and what shoes does God want on a woman? Not the...

After Giving Questionable Advice To a Friend I'm Attracted To.(poem)
January 1, 1999... I pull the frayed rope and the rototiller sputters forward, kicking up a last thin crust of frost. I love this seasonal rhythm: the tug, diffident catch, the blades beginning to mix centuries of clay and earth ...

Broken Glass.(poem)
January 1, 1999... In 1070 my father returned to the sweetness of desolation, wandering past rows of mobile homes, past the hulls of cars splayed in the wheatgrass that whiskered their silent engines, past the skeletons of stripped...

Low-Floating Balloons.(short story)
January 1, 1999... When Faith comes down from rocking Andrew, tucking him in, the wreckage of the party hasn't disappeared. The house still smells of leftover pizza and sickly-sweet, artificially-flavored icing, and that awful red punch, the shadow of which is...

Lying in Wait.(poem)
January 1, 1999... The cancer ward lies in wait With the mess of death The clogged cemeteries With the ugly haste of burial Lying in wait is the slow decay The wet and dry rot of the body All this bides its time Behind the...

Night Oak Tree.(poem)
January 1, 1999... It happened at night that a passerby heard a sound and turned around: an oak tree was coming from behind. He stopped, he waited. This oak, with its freshly torn roots, was coming, swaying along the pavement on its...

My Wasted Chance.(poem)
January 1, 1999... Now I won't die young, another one of my wasted chances. My decisions can't be explained by inexperience, I'm seasoned, well matured for death. I no longer weigh what would have been wiser and I no longer am ashamed of...

From the Fifties.(poem)
January 1, 1999... Mother's Singer sewing machine, covered up at the bark of the watchdog. Father's fear of being sent for. The Affair of the Anxious Moment. The communists, as if riding wild horses. Celluloid communists, Sunday...

Four Stories.(poem)
January 1, 1999... 1 That I once stayed with friends in the high pines. 2 That the dog hunted in the woods and we yelled dictator jokes after him. 3 You and I. 4 That we were still young. ...

Night.(poem)
January 1, 1999... night of screams flowing through the brain stabbed suddenly in the throat rain streams down then silence no winds no sounds of dripping water emptied out thwarted night sneaking behind back in front of face...

Princes, Very Late.(short story)
January 1, 1999... I'm in a car in the club parking lot making out with a summer tourist; or not in the parking lot but down a ways, up on the shoulder of a side road. Going at it pretty passionately and I only met him a few minutes ago and he has light-brown...

The Actor.(short story)
January 1, 1999... Introduction For three weeks, an aspiring young actor waited tables at a Persian restaurant in New York City until he got sick of it and took a second-shift job with a newspaper. This is his story. The Interview Process The actor...

Hunting Icebergs.(short story)
January 1, 1999... Death by violence, death by cold... -- Theodore Roosevelt, African Game Trails Sousa stood on the shore of Lake Victoria, sobbing into his sousaphone. It was a mournful sight, and we closed our hampers uncomfortably. We had left...

O.J., Can You See?(short story)
January 1, 1999... I almost never miss, but it's Tuesday this mornin', and somehow Monday just disappeared down an invisible black hole. Truth is, I slept right through breakfast yesterday for havin' taken that damn football game too serious, havin' drunk at...

Iliad in Another Time and Place.(poem)
January 1, 1999... Agamemnon insists on retaining the company he acquired and won't accept the tender offer from Nestor, which results in massive strikes, harsh press and a bad fourth quarter, so Achilles, his CEO, argues for divestiture but...

Palette.(poem)
January 1, 1999... The colors of the afternoon, red from August heat, yellow of heliopsis following the sun, purple of coneflowers that aren't purple at all, blue of the sky when the wind is from the north, the milky white that follows on a...

Birding.(poem)
January 1, 1999... Absolutely unmixed attention is prayer. --Simone Weil Do you remember your first bird, the way it scuttled across the lawn, stopped stiff, tilted its head, and listened to the earth? Don't you still need to hold still...

Simmer Dim.(poem)
January 1, 1999... On the longest day of the year, like bee-in-a-bottle memory, the sound of bagpipes in my ears, a Scottish bonnet reveille, pulls me blindly through the slit of tent to pee in midnight light that slaps my eyes back...

Set.(poem)
January 1, 1999... Another sun watched down, one of the ways here we count up life. I've taken pictures, but their souls untie themselves and slip the camera. Memory, even, fails a brilliance it can't bear. So we like to follow the drop...

The World of Things.(short story)
January 1, 1999... In space things touch. In time things part. --E.M. Forester My house is filled with objects taken from my parents' house and other parents' houses, perhaps yours. I have a particular taste for the things of the fifties, the era when my...

Another Street.(poem)
January 1, 1999... The only explanation must be that behind this street, somewhere, there is another street, where balls bounce and nothing crumbles. Kitchens and backyards smell of cinnamon, stories find their own time, and all the...

so gone he couldn't come back if he wanted to.(poem)
January 1, 1999... he says baby, come here i'm too busy though tryin to close the windows before my curtains become drenched with the rain he's sittin on the couch we got from sears drinking his beer breathin so hard ...

The Secret of Life.(poem)
January 1, 1999... Even as the murderous gardener kneels in the grass and drives his screwdriver deep into the milk heart of a last renegade growing on the front lawn, the sly forest of dandelions with their ...

Passing.
January 1, 1999... Centuries ago when people were stupid one way to dispose of a wart was to throw a stone at a coffin during a funeral cortege, recite the Trinity and ask the corpse to bear life's imperfection to the flawless...

Dust to dust.(poem)
January 1, 1999... It seemed to Amos as to Hosea desert mornings of late bristled with signs portending stark changes, stark comings on, signals of God knows what from God knows where. Amos felt buoyant, as if a river of fresh rain...

Pop Culture and Poetry: An Interview with David Trinidad.(poem)(Interview)
January 1, 1999... David Trinidad is the author of eight books and chapbooks of poetry, most recently Answer Song (High Risk Books, 1994). His other books include Hand Over Heart: Poems 1981-1988, Pavane, November, and Monday, Monday. His poems have appeared in...

Blessings.(Ukraine)(poem)
January 1, 1999... Late on the first Saturday in May, a week after Orthodox Easter, on a plaza across the street from Independence Square, nee Great October Revolution Square, when the sun has already set and the stars are just coming into view, a group of old...

Because They Wanted To.(Review)
January 1, 1999... Mary Gaitskill, Because They Wanted To. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1997. Mary Gaitskill's debut collection, Bad Behavior (1988), and her novel, Two Girls, Fat and Thin (1991), introduced her as a promising writer, noted for her risky...

The Various Reasons of Light.(Review)
January 1, 1999... Renee Ashley, The Various Reasons of Light. New York: Avocet Press, 1998. This is a wonderful book of poems, deeply serious yet imbued with the sense of humor that a sharp eye and empathetic heart bring to the most serious subjects. Thus,...