I wrote a review of As Consciousness Is Harnessed to Flesh, the second volume of Susan Sontag’s personal notebooks, for IDIOM.  You can read it here.

XING and Saturnalia Books get a nice mention in this Ploughshares post by poet Victoria Chang. 

It’s 4 in the morning, the end of December,

I’m writing you now just to see if you’re better,

New York is cold, but I like where I’m living

There’s music on Clinton Street all through the evening.

I hear that you’re building your little house deep in the desert.

You’re living for nothing now,

I hope that you’re keeping some kind of record.

-Leonard Cohen

Philadelphia, PA.

I am so late to my own party.

The birds pecked my eyes out.  They tried for yours but you swerved.

I played at TWENTY QUESTIONS.  And house.  And his/her towelettes. 

All went to bed, famished.

Q: Do you succeed always?

A: I succeed 30 percent of the time.

Q: Then you don’t succeed always.

A: Yes I do. To succeed 30% of the time is always.

-Susan Sontag

I was Howie’s girlfriend for a year, before he left, graduated from Mount Brookfield ahead of me, and bucking his parents, set out with two buddies for the Alaskan pipeline, where after three months, I was told later by his mother, he disappeared in the snow, came down with the snow madness that caused men to get into their tractors and just drive off into the blinding white horizon, never coming back.

I forced myself to go on to someone else after that, then someone else again, never attaching in quite the same ferocious, virginal way, never with that enthralled and orphaned heart, not quite like that, and I missed him for years, years into college.  By then my parents had moved from Horsehearts to the east coast of Florida with my grandmother, who, when I visited, stared at me with the staggering, arrogant stare of the dying, the wise vapidity of the already gone; she refused to occupy the features of her face.  The living didn’t interest her; she grew bored when anyone spoke.  In her yawn I could see the black-and-white dice of her filled teeth, the quiet snap of her spit, all gathered in a painting of departure.  It is unacceptable, all the stunned and anxious missing a person is asked to endure in a life.  It is not to be endured, not really.