ISSUES | winter 2006
29.4 (Winter 2006): "Black and White"
Featuring work by Courtney Angela Brkic, Rana Dasgupta, Patricia Foster, Seth Fried, Bob Hicok, Jesal Kanani, Sandra Kohler, V. Penelope Pelizzon, Stormy Stipe, Silas Dent Zobal…a look at the drawings of Romaine Brooks…and an interview with Terrance Hayes.
CONTENT FROM THIS ISSUE
Art
Dec 01 2006
Haunted: The Drawings of Romaine Brooks
The full text of this feature is not currently available online.
In 1930, after Romaine Brooks sprained her leg, her doctor prescribed bed rest. The artist shut herself in her room in her Parisian apartment on rue Raymond and used the seclusion to begin her Memoir, No Pleasant Memories.
Fiction
Dec 01 2006
The Archimedes Palimpsest
Our lives recall the textual. For one winter of my adult life, my father and I lived in a farmhouse in Boone County, Illinois. This was 1999. My father, Asel Poole, was dying of lymphoma. My wife and I had separated. The earth wintered; the air turned sharp with cold; the fields stretched expansively in white.
Poetry
Dec 01 2006
Poetry Feature: Bob Hicok
Featuring the poems: Higher Calling, The Quiet Americans, String Theory, Verisimilitude
Poetry
Dec 01 2006
Poetry Feature: Sandra Kohler
Featuring the poems: Directions, The Garden’s Name, Countenance, Elemental, As It Is, Love Poem
Fiction
Dec 01 2006
The Siege
The men on the walls are all dead. The city is ravaged, but still, somehow, untaken. Imagine, if you will, a cachetic dog limping down a street littered with corpses. Corpses everywhere.
Poetry
Dec 01 2006
Poetry Feature: V. Penelope Pelizzon
Featuring the poem:
The Ladder
Interviews
Dec 01 2006
A Conversation with Terrance Hayes
The full text of this interview is currently not available online.
And [Thelonius] Monk says, Man, every time you play you’re rehearsing! And I thought, That’s profound. It’s true, every poem is a rehearsal for the next poem, which is a rehearsal for the next poem. The idea of improvisation, rehearsal, movement, experiment–that’s what I’m interested in as an artist.
Fiction
Dec 01 2006
Gathering Up the Little Gods
She has always loved motion. When her legs stride beneath her and her hands cut the air she imagines the muscle and bone that produce her forward movement. She pictures them like a diagram from Grey’s Anatomy, a copy of which she keeps on her bookshelf at home.
Nonfiction
Dec 01 2006
The Piano Teacher
My mother came with me; I was about thirteen. The house was sturdy and Victorian. The woman who opened the door was not Miss Bor but her sister. We went through to wait.
Foreword
Dec 01 2006
What a Writer Does Best
The full text of this foreword is not currently available online.
One winter evening many years ago, some friends and I were entertaining ourselves with a game of free association. We were to respond without hesitation to whatever word or phrase the questioner put to us. Instead about asking about the obvious things– favorite hobbies, best moview, happiest moments, etc.– my friend was being philosophical. To me he said, “Literature,” and my unthinking response was, “Black and white.”
Fiction
Dec 01 2006
Summers in Agaas
All I knew was to pocket some lemons in my favourite sky-blue dress before the scrawny old women realized… and we ran cutting through the light, vaporizing air, the sunrays springing from a blue blue sky, splashing on our hair.
Fiction
Dec 01 2006
An Art
“We’ll hide here,” my sister Helen said, and pulled me onto a bed of pine straw under the fence at the edge of the ditch. We watched my mother drive slowly through the puddles of our driveway. … My older brother, Hal, had smeared ketchup on the floor of the front room, smudged a wad of his own dark hair and several strands of my sister’s along the edges, and run out the back door. He was hiding in the tractor-shed yard.
Nonfiction
Dec 01 2006
The Deserter
I never thought I’d end up here, some sucker looking for hope. But then, who really plans on being desperate? Who plans on home invasion or diabetes or falling on your ass after you’ve stepped on a bad patch of ice? All I know is that desperation got me on this plane to Toronto, where I sit quietly in the middle seat in row fifteen, rubbing a piece of lamb fat across my lips.