Triquarterly – serie

Deftly moving between the comic and the tragic, the sacred and the profane, this collection of short stories is populated by modern children, ancient poets, dying men, and your basic, mundane Greek gods. Windsor turns familiar stories from the Bible and from myth inside out, exploring the feelings of minor characters and looking at events from imaginative perspectives. His prose is rich with detail and emotion and he touches on themes of art and artifice, success and failure, family and its sacrifices, and expectations met or missed.In ""The Last Israelite in the Red Sea,"" a follower of Moses who dallies during their Exodus finds it more difficult to walk across the bottom of the temporarily displaced Red Sea without shoes. ""Four of the Times My Sister Cried"" follows a young narrator as his family rehearses for his mother's death and then, as they must, lives without her. The wry ""The Art of War"" has characters from Homer to a courtesan talking shop about the battle of Troy from their perspectives. Set as a series of short pieces, ""The Fleshly School of Poetry"" tells of lessons learned and lessons taught. With its explorations of expectations, ""Meet the Author"" gives readers intimate portraits of various plans or coping mechanisms people put up when death draws close.""The End of the World"" approaches the Rapture with a humorously practical spin: wouldn't the angels need a plan to ensure that it goes smoothly? ""In Parting"" explores some of the troubles with family, especially when a sister's child turns out to be a marionette. The geographically explicit ""Three Mediums in San Francisco"" touches on frustrated and imagined eroticism. The collection ends with ""The Hilton Epiphany,"" a fitting closer in which divinity comes to an unlikely person in an unlikely place.

Tahrir Suite is a book-length poem that contemplates immigration, homeland, and diaspora in the twenty-first century. The poem, inspired by recent events in Egypt, cycles through the journey of two Egyptians moving across borders, languages, cultures, landscapes, and political systems while their life in the U.S. diaspora evolves and their home country undergoes revolutionary change.Written from a perspective and about a place that is virtually unexplored in contemporary American poetry, Tahrir Suite works to capture the complicated essence of what it means to be from a specific place that is experiencing such radical change and how our understandings of ""home"" and ""place"" constantly evolve. Tahrir Suite is a musical meditation on what it means to be a global citizen in contemporary times.

As if convinced that all divination of the future is somehow a revisioning of the past, Kwame Dawes reminds us of the clairvoyance of haunting. The lyric poems in City of Bones: A Testament constitute a restless jeremiad for our times, and Dawes’s inimitable voice peoples this collection with multitudes of souls urgently and forcefully singing, shouting, groaning, and dreaming about the African diasporic present and future. As the twentieth collection in the poet’s hallmarked career, City of Bones reaches a pinnacle, adding another chapter to the grand narrative of invention and discovery cradled in the art of empathy that has defined his prodigious body of work. Dawes’s formal mastery is matched only by the precision of his insights into what is at stake in our lives today. These poems are shot through with music from the drum to reggae to the blues to jazz to gospel, proving that Dawes is the ambassador of words and worlds.

James Magruder’s collection of linked stories follows two gay cousins, Tom and Elliott, from adolescence in the 1970s to adulthood in the early ’90s. With a rueful blend of comedy and tenderness, Magruder depicts their attempts to navigate the closet and the office and the lessons they learn about libidinous co-workers, résumé boosting, Italian suffixes, and frozen condoms. As Tom and Elliot search for trusting relationships while the AIDS crisis deepens, their paths diverge, leading Tom to a new sense of what matters most. Magruder is especially adept at rendering the moments that reveal unwritten codes of behaviour to his characters who have no way of learning them except through painful experience. Loss is sudden, the fallout portrayed with a powerful economy. In Tom and Elliott, readers come to recognise themselves, driven by the same absurd desires and unconscious impulses, subjected to the same fates.