• The Future

    D. Nurkse

    Summer 2020

    I spend more and more time in the underworld. It’s not that I don’t like this world, Kensington, Brooklyn, long rainy streets, domesticated maples carved with hearts and names, the little factories that make bits of things—second hands for stopwatches, latches for the cases of flutes.

    I love to lie beside my wife, watching clouds mass in the mirror, waiting for a thread of cold morning rain, listening to her calm adamant breath and perhaps a scrap of Meek Mill from a passing SUV.

    It’s just that the underworld is magnificent. The streets there glitter. The house I am summoned to has no number. A cat waits behind the door; his eyes are dazzling, purely reflective. The bookshelves are imposing, but all the books are blank, no titles on the spines.

    D. Nurkse’s latest book is A Country of Strangers, a collection of new and selected poems from Knopf.

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    Green Lights, Blue Skies

    Lea Carpenter

    And she could see, at last, that the origins of this experience had been lived by and passed down through so many others whose names she would not recognize, whose wisdom she could not catch.

    Late Migrations

    Margaret Renkl

    This life thrives on death. But hold very, very still in the springtime sun, and a tufted titmouse will come to harvest your hair and spin it into a soft, warm place for her young. Keep an eye on the ivy climbing the side of the house, and one day you will see a pair of finches coaxing their babies from a tiny nest balanced among the leaves. Hear the bluebirds calling from the trees, and you might turn in time to see a fledgling peer from the hole in the dark nest box, gape at the bright wide world for the very first time, and then trust itself to the sky. Wait at the window on the proper day, and the cottontail nest hidden under the rosemary bush will open before you, spilling forth little rabbits who lift the leaves from last fall and push aside their mother’s fur and raise their ears and wrinkle their noses and bend for their first taste of the bitter dandelion. And it will be exactly what they wanted. 

    Staff Picks: Thanksgiving

    The Sewanee Review

    Winter is upon us, and though the seasons have changed, the times have yet to follow suit. Our staff came together to share some reads varied in subject—Nietzsche, the tragic lives of artists, apocalypse narratives, and pandemic poems—but tethered by theme: imaginative escape and the vitality of hope.

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