All posts tagged: Nina Semczuk

What We’re Reading: July 2025

Curated by KEI LIM

This July, ELIZABETH METZGER, NINA SEMCZUK, and SEÁN CARLSON bring you ruminations on what it feels like to return—to home, to memory, to oneself. As they make sense of their own lives through a poetry collection, novel, and essay collection, their recommendations invite us to contemplate what it means to exist within both change and stillness, and how time itself can wander and fragment.

Cover of The Lyrics by Fanny Howe

Fanny Howe’s The Lyrics, recommended by Issue 24 Contributor Elizabeth Metzger

It’s early July, and I’m in the middle of moving back to the East Coast. Right now, a few days after the death of the poet Fanny Howe, I am reading her collection The Lyrics, on a screened porch in the late afternoon in the Berkshires, watching geese gather on a tiny red dock. I can hear the voices of parents across the pond teaching their children to fish, to let the fish go. I’m appreciating the element of air as I remember it from childhood, a sort of thickening all around me that feels wearable, welcoming, at times oppressive, a return to an old life from the other side.

What We’re Reading: July 2025
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Crafts Like the Old Country

By NINA SEMCZUK

That morning Irina Pychenko found herself in the ditch, again. It was the fourth time in a month.

“Third time this week I’ve found someone right here,” said the gentleman outside of her window, who was hooking a chain to the tow hitch under the back bumper. She had barely finished mashing her grill into the snow when he’d pulled over. “You wouldn’t believe how many people haven’t got their snow tires on yet.” His words made white puffs in the air, holding his speech like cartoon captions. “You neither,” he said, kicking her half bald Buick tires.

Crafts Like the Old Country
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