Celebrate the year’s end with work by powerful younger poets new to our pages: R. A. Villanueva, James Byrne, and Nathaniel Bellows
Introduction: On Karadib
My first roommate in Riyadh was a French teacher who once tutored an ex-political prisoner. The man was a retired lawyer who had belonged to a Marxist-Leninist network in the sixties, and had been part of a coup attempt against King Faisal. He had been tipped off right before his arrest and had escaped to Paris, where he studied law before coming back to Riyadh much later. Others had less luck.Arrested on intelligence provided by U.S. agents to the Saudi secret police, many of them were tortured or summarily executed. Some were even flown above the Empty Quarter and thrown alive out of helicopters.
Adapted by ROLF POTTS
Illustrated by CEDAR VAN TASSEL
One enticing thing about travel tales from distant centuries is the way they suggest so many more stories that haven’t been told. While we assume that Marco Polo was a pioneer in his journey to the Far East, for example, we learn from his own narrative that he encountered other Europeans – Germans, Lombards, Frenchmen – in the cities of China. Polo’s contemporary, William of Rubruck, traveled across Asia and found Greek doctors, Ukrainian carpenters, and Parisian goldsmiths working in the Mongolian capital of Karakorum. As intriguing as these thirteenth-century accounts of Marco and William are, imagine a rich trove of unknown travelers’ diaries stretching far deeper into antiquity.
By ANIKA GUPTA
A year ago, a girl my age was raped in New Delhi. Several days later she died of her injuries in a hospital in Singapore. Her intestines were so badly mangled she would have required a transplant to live. If she had lived, she would never have eaten without the aid of a tube.
Book by DAVID MIDDLETON
Reviewed by
Southern writer can be a term of endearment or an epithet. The late Mississippi-born novelist and short-story writer, Barry Hannah, bristled at the label. “Professional Southerners sicken me,” he said. Yet to my ear, Hannah’s work sounds entirely Southern.
Being from Mississippi and sounding it (I’m sure), I can’t help but feel that idiom has more to do with the Southern-ness of literature than geography. So I found myself at a loss when I began reading David Middleton’s The Fiddler of Driskill Hill. The content of Middleton’s poems is undeniably Southern: Louisianan, precisely.
Work by MARTHA WILLETTE LEWIS, Curated by JEFF BERGMAN
Our relationship with maps has changed drastically in the last ten years, from the pinpoint ease of Google Maps to global positioning systems rendering us a blinking blue beacon on a grid of streets. Rarely are we explorers in the completed cartography of our planet. Visual artist Martha Willette Lewis has given us new, unreal spaces to explore by combining diagrammatic drawings, biological systems, and topographical forms. These spaces manifest as works on paper that are often folded, crumpled, or bisected. Lewis takes visual cues from systems that are usually not in contact and, in doing so, creates a skewed sense of reality. Hers is a hybridized vision shared by artists and technological innovators. The paper and drawing are real, but the vision is of an impossible place.
It is Red Cup season! Under halogen lights, red metal tumblers gleam and pinken plastic to-go mugs. Swirled teacups shine like candy canes. Behind the café counter, whipped-cream ski hills top the menu of seasonal drinks with a flurry of diamonds and snowflakes. In sizes tall, grande, and venti, towers of patterned coffee cups are plucked by red-aproned baristas, like ornaments off a tree.
It’s late afternoon on the beach in North Florida. It’s October, the end of a season, and the world is in motion. Monarchs cloud through the sunlight in orange swarms; blooms of jellyfish float along the shoreline; and schools of grouper leap in flustered succession, tails suspended above the ocean, bodies flapping. The air is just cold enough to make us duck our shoulders under water and lift our faces toward the sun, not shivering but not warm.
The moment I succumbed to life in the suburbs for the duration of our two-year stay, my husband’s employers offered us an apartment in the middle of Salvador. We promptly packed our twelve suitcases and moved to Barra, a neighborhood on the peninsula between the Bay of All Saints and the Atlantic Ocean. Again, the steep hills and winding sidewalks dotted by sprawling almond trees evoked in me an eerie familiarity. The main bedroom’s built-in wooden closet smelled musty, old-world, and opening its doors never failed to conjure up my grandmother.
By HELEN HOOPER
Sometimes I have to leave the house, get out in the world and write among other people. Not that I want anything to do with any of them. I just want to set up among them, the better to hunker down. I’m looking to be anonymous. I’m looking for a place where I can concentrate on my characters while ignoring people. A place where the rest of humanity provides a soothing backdrop, a therapeutic white noise.
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Celebrating 15 Years