All posts tagged: Nicole Cooley

What We’re Reading: May 2025

Curated by SAM SPRATFORD

The summer months, with their sprawling days, coax us to explore new literary worlds. If you’re not reading Issue 29—which features short stories from Hawai‘i, Kenya, Baton Rouge, and an Austin boxing gym—these recommendations from its contributors TERESE SVOBODA, NICOLE COOLEY, and BILL COTTER will help to revive the childhood magic of summer reading. Read on to discover poetry and prose titles that give permission, immortalize, and remind us how “fiercely beautiful” words can be.

cover of the swan book

Molly Giles’ Lifespan and Alexis Wright’s The Swan Book; recommended by Issue 29 contributor Terese Svoboda

Molly Giles’ 2024 memoir, Lifespan or the novel The Swan Book published in 2013 by Alexis Wright? The first is a perfectly wrought, very moving series of flash pieces of a life experienced above, under, around, and on the Golden Gate Bridge. The second is a wildly inventive, messy novel about the love of Australian black swans by a rebellious woman abducted from a swamp to be the wife of the Australian president. I won’t choose.

What We’re Reading: May 2025
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August 2024 Poetry Feature: New Poems By Our Contributors

New Poems by Our Contributors NICOLE COOLEY, DUY ĐOÀN, and JOHN KINSELLA.

 

Table of Contents:

  • Nicole Cooley, “Covanta, A Detail”
  • Duy Đoàn, “Norepinephrine — “Suicides in Fiction Say Goodbye”
  • John Kinsella, “Before Eurydice Was Bitten”

 

Covanta, A Detail
By Nicole Cooley

The incinerator smoke an incision in the sky.
My daughter no longer small yet still I want to swallow her back into my body.
Sky a scalding.
My daughter asks me to stop saying, I wish this wasn’t the world you have to live in.
In my dream my girl is the size of a thumb I catch between my teeth.
Sky all smoke.
In the morning, men wearing masks drag our cans out to their truck.
In the morning, out the kitchen window, I wish the wide street rivered.

August 2024 Poetry Feature: New Poems By Our Contributors
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