And you become the child you never knew how to be, brazen, as the insects keep buzzing in the cavern of your ear. Something of the world is entering into you and you no longer refuse it, the purity of grieving. It bursts in, pushes you out of bed on those darkest nights when you …
Like a lover who sets her fear ablaze until nothing is left but a small pile of embers, I love how leaves and vines grow through the sweetness of tears, in the center of the face, in its astonishment. Light. Serenity, the echo that the voice discovers as it ventures along new paths. Learning to …
How many flowers underneath our Sunday dresses, pinks and crinolines skipping toward the church, while our mothers, squeezed tight in their mother shells, were marching along dreaming of a Christ who would redeem the emptiness of bedrooms. I was a happy little girl with the bright eyes of a believer. For God was a man …
I’m from nowhere when the sky pulls back, from no forest, no city, like a woman sitting in her woman’s littleness seeking her face through a shrouded window. There, in the memory of my death, the exact instant when breathing left me, I rock back and forth soundlessly, surprised to find myself whole again in …
Ecco, 2017. 320 pp. $26.99 (cloth) The Cincinnati Review will, in most issues, publish multiple reviews of the same book in the hope of presenting a rich and disparate commentary on the work. Overabundance in Made for Love Alissa Nutting’s Made for Love is concerned with a would-be surveillance state, a place so eerily familiar …
Questions for the author That old-fashioned fish-wrapper, the Times Literary Supplement, sometimes asks its readers to try to find, say, the earliest telephone call in fiction. The earliest motorcar ride in a novel. The earliest excursion to the cinema. The first television. (As I write this, I half wonder: Did the old-fashioned TLS invent crowdsourcing?) …
Crawling Toward Authenticity Alissa Nutting excels at writing unlikable characters. In Tampa, her first novel, a middle-school teacher narrates (in explicit detail) her seduction of a fourteen-year-old student. Celeste Price has no redeeming qualities aside from her humanity, but one comes to understand that as much as she enjoys sex with boys, she feels trapped …
Artist Statement I have increasingly been fascinated by the wiring of our visual pathways, how from puzzling composites, gray matter assembles images using both sides of the brain. I depict this action literally with bobber and telephone-wire pathways in the piece titled “Punk Rock Puzzle Head.” “Flotation” and “Flying Fish” are flashbacks to an ocean …
Who: brittany tara vera sammy tom hope amberamaryllis edward mary senator twin job man mother rhondasecret girlfriend social media prologue (The students are gathered around on the lawn.) amber: This is it. amaryllis: The damp, god-awful lawn. sammy: Where we slept for a week vera: And dreamed tara: And fought tom: And fell in …
National Pen Pal Day June 1, 2018 Think back to when you were a kid and you’d give the classroom globe a spin, stop it with your fingertip, and vow to move to whatever loca- tion you landed on. Recall how sometimes you’d hit the ocean and have to spin again. Recall that sometimes you’d …