Sublime

Connally, his arm in a sling, hovered pacing at the perimeter of our circle, drinking at a bottled seltzer whose volume seemed to remain somehow constant.

people like Tranströmer and Ondaatje and Wisława Szymborska are touchstones for me. It’s a long list: George Seferis, Anne Carson, Charles Simic, Sharon Olds, Seamus Heaney: anyone who has found a way to sidestep conventional syntax.

Ernest Hemingway thought the “Crack-Up” pieces were “miserable.” People experienced emptiness many

Another event that cheered Max was his publishing a promising new writer named Morley Callaghan, a Canadian. Callaghan had met Hemingway when their careers at the Toronto Star overlapped; then he went to

Damn it all. Prince Jones was dead. And hell upon those who tell us to be twice as good and shoot us no matter. Hell for ancestral fear that put black parents under terror. And hell upon those who shatter the holy vessel.

Endless books and authors followed, as we worked our way methodically down the list: The Count of Monte Cristo, Edgar Allan Poe, Robinson Crusoe, Ivanhoe, Gogol, The Last of the Mohicans, Dickens, Twain, Austen, Billy Budd … By the time I was twelve, I was picking them out myself, and my brother Suman was sending me the books he had read in college