Scott Hightower “What will survive of us is love” Philip Larkin December, 1971. A light snow. The Taft Hotel. Our room across the street, overlooked the Winter Garden stage door. I was green and this was to be my first taste of Broadway. By the time the lights and trumpets lifted on the “Loveland” number, I was lost in years monogrammed across silk sashes, wigs, and in the follies of relationships...

Sam Selinger “Curious Masonry” Christopher Patton 2011, 9781554470938, $15.95 Christopher Patton’s third book, Curious Masonry, includes three translations of Anglo-Saxon poems from The Exeter Book, and “Hearth,” a work which he calls a “palimpsest,” mostly made up of erasures from his translation of “The Earthwalker,” using both the translation and the original text. The Exeter Book is an anthology of...

Mara Michael Jebsen i’m starting to be startled       by the way time passes it seems to fall out              like clumps of hair its November         the Hudson river’s all gooseflesh and silver the history books sing of trains, souls boarding and riding       till the end of the line         i dream California lemons        oranges             ...

Scott Hightower The figure standing and raising a sword between Babylon and the return to Jerusalem was St. Michael, protector of Abraham’s people; Justice; Michael, field commander of the army of “the one true God.” * In 1909, New York City commissioned Frederick MacMonnies, one of America’s most prominent sculptors, to design a fountain for the entry park of City Hall. A monumental statue was to rise heroically from the center...

The prolific London-born writer sits down with Ben to discuss his process, style, and latest collection, It's Beginning To Hurt.

Michael Tyrell Continually, as October weeds out the majority of false Edens, the hollow Eve finds us sweet teeth bobbing for apples. Scratch us so we can start over, so we can turncoat through iron-maiden turnstiles. Crosstown ride where the Lord give uth and take uth away, flasher whose jimson got jammed in slamming doors. We might miss an apocalyptic eclipse, but the river-frontiers burst in the Eerie Canals. House and Garden...

Bruce Bromley She thought that she wanted him to stay in the same place, but she did not know where that place was. She wanted to be able to return to him, to come back with bags of vegetables, coffee, and cheese, to open their apartment door and smell the rosemary soap he showered with on weekday evenings before Noah was born. She would track him through the kitchen, down the hall, into the living room where he would be standing before the...

Scott Hightower Tennessee Williams knew how to mine the kinetics of cruelty. Not the inverted and demure, “I’ll roll over, and let you ravish me, you he-man man, you!” Forget Stella. No. It’s Stanley, the shrieking infantile god, who’s vicious; who’s had enough of just “whistling Dixie;” who finally succumbs to being topped by Stella’s transvestite brother, who, in turn, has had enough of railroad Johns, and of...

Michael Tyrell The tuxed-up drunk, trembling the dorm’s lobby window when a bottle tipped him over. His squint not at me but past me to the one hundred keys glittering behind my post, the check-in desk, where all summer, I worked the Saturday insomnia shift. The ruse of looking down at the marble notebook, one-one thousand, then looking up: the drunk gone, like a movie ghost. The prank caller, the phone a bee-sting sound. The paper I...

Michael Tyrell I was born the summer of his disgrace. That’s always been my claim. And it’s a trait I despise in other people: hitching the intensely personal to the historical, making Watergate a lame pun for passage and delivery. But my mother insists on scandal. An unmarried mother, middle-aged— she swears her pregnancy didn’t show, even that morning she locked herself in the toilet and told her own mother to call...