Apprehension How can what I know nowthat came as a shock thenfeel like a secret I kept from you?How can my knowing, nowthat I would wake up and youwould not, feel like I amkeeping it from you still?Is it because of time, what happens to timewhen one heart stops and one heartgoes on? Is it because it will always be the night before,and I will always know how it will end? Admission You die, and
Dear Readers, This is the long-awaited “Fall 2024” issue arriving in January 2025. Here is part of the reason why—in addition to the arbitrariness of print publishing deadlines in the current era, the second half of 2024 contained more panic, rupture, and change than any previous year of my life: a sudden divorce, urgent move, dropping off son at college, overseeing son’s leaving said college, spending half the week as writer-in-residence at Smith and the
I love it when a poem teaches me something I didn’t know about the endless strangeness of our human past. I had never heard of chicken skin gloves before reading Evangeline Riddiford Graham’s wonderful poem about them. All the rage in Europe from the eighteenth century to the mid-nineteenth, the gloves were intended to soften and whiten the hands of aristocratic ladies, and were made not out of actual chicken skin (phew—that does sound rather gross)
To the editor of LIBER, I knew I was gonna love Jessica Baumgardner’s piece about Catherine Newman’s novel Sandwich (“Flesh and Blood,” volume 3, issue 1), and then I loved it even way more than that. The writing about Jessica’s inner life and relationship to her family is so vivid—it all resonates and shows me things I might have missed otherwise. (Like, a 4:30 p.m. rage hour is a thing?!) I loved what she says
JinJin Xu. What Would You Hear If You Could? #8: Against This Earth, We Knock. Site-specific installation. Old pots (collected in JiangYong), coal ashes (collected in JiangYong), resin, mechanical installation, 2024. Photo courtesy of How Art Museum. Since 2017 JinJin Xu’s head has been full of voices. What the voices are saying is impossible to summarize. Here are some fragments: I tried to feel this is my home.I don’t think I am a foreigner.I hope she’s
On June 26, 2024, a group of feminists whose work focuses on all things reproductive gathered to begin strategizing for the long term about how to regain the rights lost by the Dobbs decision. Our group ranged in age from seventeen to seventy-eight and included a journalist, a playwright, three actors, a novelist, two lawyers, a doctor, and the founder of a women’s health clinic. We started the meeting with a scene from Rose of
During the twelve-month gap between undergrad at Penn and postgraduate studies at Harvard Divinity School, one year into my Buddhist practice, I felt it was the right time for a five-day silent meditation retreat. I had heard from other practitioners how transformational sustained silence could be, although more seasoned enlightenment seekers cautioned me to go into the experience with as few expectations as possible. The retreat center in western Massachusetts implored us to put away
Gloves In another century he gives her a pair of chicken skin gloves. Chicken skin gloves, dark cream from the top of the bottle, worn so close the ripples of her cuticles show through—fine gloves, rolled up inside a walnut shell and carried with a ribbon. Chicken skin gloves. Draped over a mouth, they soften a beard, take the bristle out of a goodnight kiss. How’s this? Wear them to bed, your hands age free
At around seven weeks of pregnancy, a mucus glob forms in the cervix and turns it from funnel into stopper. This blood-tinged plug keeps the baby in utero and anything lurking in your vagina out. When the evocatively named “bloody show” discharges, it’s time for the main event. I learned the term a few months before giving birth the first time, after which I shoved the gory mucus plug into the back of my consciousness-closet,
There’s something so American about Rae Armantrout’s poetry. It has the sudden breaks, the start-and-stop of Emily Dickinson; the direct colloquial speaking voice of William Carlos Williams; the abstract playfulness of John Ashbery. Her poems offer a constant sense of reinvention, and an invitation to the reader to make it all up along with the poet that I think of as America’s gift to poetry. This is a poet who puts her secrets on the
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