Guest Post: Annette Oxindine, Saying Yes: Wool, Feather, Chintz; House, Bridge, River

“In dreams begin responsibility.” Yeats’s epigraph to Responsibilities had been pinned to the bulletin board above my desk for so many years that it lost any meaningful connection to his actual 1914 volume of poems and, eventually, just lost meaning.  It had become a workaday adage at best, the kind you might find in a day planner designed to keep you beholden to your to-do list.  At worst, it conjured up one of those motivational posters of late capitalism—the kind you might find in a brokerage firm or university president’s office—in which a tanned, forty-something white male model dressed in a cable-knit sweater and a captain’s cap, unsoiled by sea salt or human sweat, looks intently at the horizon from the helm of a sailboat. In short, for me, Yeats’s words about dreams and responsibility had lost their soul.

Bee sitting on a flower

The epigraph In dreams begin responsibility got its soul back and began to fortify my own as a result of my engagement with the unflinchingly responsible work of living dreaming poets. This is a kind of thank-you letter to them. While the writers whose work sustains me are many, I want to focus on three who, in a very real way, made themselves responsible to the work their dreaming selves demanded of them. Mary Ruefle’s Madness, Rack, and Honey: Collected Lectures (2012), Patti Smith’s memoir M Train (2015), and Ross Gay’s Catalog of Unabashed Gratitude (2016), especially its title poem, have individually and collectively returned to me the transformative possibilities of the word “dream,” for I had stopped considering how an unbidden message from the deepest part of the self, rather than a willed “dream” (translation: a goal, one of the least inspiring words in the English language), could call one into being, and, in turn, make one profoundly responsible to one’s own being—and own writing.

“I don’t know where to begin because I have nothing to say, yet I know that before long I will sound as if I’m on a crusade.”  So begins Mary Ruefle’s brilliant shape-shifting title lecture from Madness, Rack, and Honey. “The phrase madness, rack, and honey came to me in a dream,” she explains.  What I find remarkable is that Ruefle’s dream seemingly contains no container for her words. They arrive disembodied: her dream, she tells us, “consisted solely of these three words.” It is these words—madness, rack, and honey—she wants to inscribe over the phrase “fine poetry” as it appears in an advertisement for Coach leather goods. In the ad, Albert Einstein’s grandson Paul, an “accomplished violinist,” serves as the well-pedigreed “clichéd portrait of a poetry-lover” who enjoys said “fine poetry” along with no-adjectives-needed “literature and philosophy” and, by implication, Coach’s luxury accessories.  Ruefle un-refines and un-accessorizes the phrase “fine poetry.” In so doing, she returns poetry to its flesh.  Taking her dream’s three words in reverse order, Ruefle analyzes the meaning of “honey” by reflecting on a centuries-old Persian poem she loves, although she cannot trace its author: “ ‘I shall not finish my poem. / What I have written is so sweet / The flies are beginning to torment me.’ ” Ruefle focuses on how the poem’s “ ‘figurative’ sweetness,” its honey, causes “ ‘ literal’ flies to swarm on the page or in or around the author’s head.” She proclaims, “This is truly the Word made flesh.” Ruefle believes that metaphor “is an event,” “an exchange of energy between two things”; metaphor “unites the world by its very premise—that things connect and exchange energy.” Such an assertion should make us realize that Ruefle’s dream phrase really is, after all, embodied: it is embodied in the physical matter that is her brain. In a later lecture, she explains, “When you hold a book in your hands you are holding a piece of cerebrum.”  Such vigorous attention to the material nature of being and writing is crucial to Madness, Rack, and Honey. As Ruefle moves from rack—“those flies are beginning to torment the poet”—to madness—poetry “creates sweetness, so that the flies might come and eat till it is gone”—she comes to apprehend that poetry is “inexplicably and exactly” defined in this line from a poem by Paul Celan: “To endlessly make an end of things.” It is the requiem that making makes that brings such haunting beauty and palpable sorrow to Ruefle’s book. But what animates it are its many secrets, its wonder, her unabashed delight in wondering rather than knowing: “I would rather wonder than know.”

“It’s not so easy writing about nothing,” says the mostly reticent cowboy in Patti Smith’s dream, providing her with the first words of M Train. We insist on persisting, her “cowpoke” tells her, as he points out the futility of “fostering all kinds of crazy hopes,” such as “redeem[ing] the lost” or recovering “some sliver of personal revelation.” Realizing she has been inside this dream before, Smith tells her cowboy, “Hey, I said, I’m not the dead, not a shade passing. I’m flesh and blood here.” He ignores her. To add to this insult, he denies that it’s even her dream; he claims it as his own. After Smith is fully awake, drinking black coffee in a favorite café, she can’t let go of the dream; the dream won’t let go of her. She writes the cowboy’s phrase on her napkin: It’s not so easy writing about nothing. She feels “a need to contradict him.” He has goaded her into writing. She muses, “I could write endlessly about nothing. If only I had nothing to say.” But Smith has everything to say. Her book is a long, beautiful meditation on what it means to stay present, even, and sometimes especially, in the presence of ghosts: “We seek to stay present, even as ghosts attempt to draw us away.” What keeps Smith from being drawn away, it seems, is her understanding that to write about everything is to invite the nothing in. M Train ends with Smith, in a dream, uniting the everything and the nothing in an intimate gesture of expansiveness that is at the heart of the book’s many internal and external pilgrimages: “I love you, I whispered, to all, to none.” Her “philosophic” cowboy replies, “Love not lightly”—although I can think of few writers who are less likely to need that advice.  Staying inside this dream, Smith concludes her book: “I am going to remember everything and then I am going to write it all down. An aria to a coat. A requiem for a café.” It is the book she has written, the book she has just given us, the book we hold in our hands.  It has heft. It is not a ghost—not yet. The last image in the book is of Smith “looking down at [her] hands,” the hands of the dreamer, the one who writes.

Whereas Patti Smith enters “the frame” of M Train’s opening dream and leaves it by boarding a train that returns her to bed, Ross Gay’s dream-messenger comes to him more urgently, by way of a “branch that grew into [his] window.” More interactive and less cryptic in its demands than Smith’s cowboy or Ruefle’s three-word phrase, Gay’s robin with “shabby wings” and “breast aflare” comes to tell him “in no uncertain terms” to“ ‘Bellow forth” his “whole rusty brass band of gratitude.” And so he does. In the poem “Catalog of Unabashed Gratitude,” among the seemingly too-many-to-name things for which the speaker expresses gratitude are friends, strangers, ancestors, “the tiny bee’s shadow,” the woman he loves, the reader (many times), the “baggie of dreadlocks” he finds in the drawer of a murdered friend, a woman who sings Erykah Badu to herself on a bus, so very many things that grow in the soil, his own “knuckleheaded heart,” and the dream that brings his dead father back to him to play him like “a bass fiddle’s strings” until he wakes up “singing.”  Yet for all the Whitmanesque abundance and exuberance that pulse through the twelve-page poem, a retreating pulse seems to work like a constant undertow—beyond even the inevitable departure of the dead who are briefly returned to the speaker.  This undertow adds even more urgency to the poet’s song of thanks. When Gay announces to his listener that his poem is finally coming to a close—“Soon it will be over”—the word “it” morphs to encompass so much more. The speaker then recalls that “the child in [his] dream” said “precisely the same thing,” “pointing at the roiling sea and the sky / hurtling our way like so many buffalo,” stressing that “it’s much worse than we think, / and sooner.” But this prophetic child isn’t telling the speaker anything he doesn’t already know. He replies,

no duh child in my dreams, what do you think

this singing and shuddering is,

what this screaming and reaching and dancing

and crying is, other than loving

what every second goes away?

Goodbye, I mean to say.

And thank you. Every day.

Reading contemporary poetry in the Anthropocene can sometimes feel like one long goodbye. The dream-child’s seeming awareness of planetary loss—the “roiling” sea and sky headed for us—can make us nostalgic for a more personal mortality, the kind that makes young Margaret weep in Gerard Manley Hopkins’s “Spring and Fall.”

In my own loving-what-every-second-goes-away dream, cherry blossoms are falling to the ground in a park near a stage on which an aria is left unfinished. I don’t remember if the singer leaves the stage or if she just stops singing. Her song is taken up by the weak but joyful voices of an older man and woman who are heading into the distance, away from the stage and the fallen blossoms. Even before waking, I understand the couple to be my mother and father, although they do not look like them. I understand that they are leaving me and also letting me know I have to stay in the park: to listen. It is then that unbidden words come to me, words I understand I must use, can only use, in a poem.

The first book about loss that I read is a novel that isn’t really a novel. It was described by its author as a “play-poem,” and it affected me deeply. One of its passages to which I often return seems like a lullaby to forlornness itself:

What is the phrase for the moon? And the phrase for love? By what name are we to call death? I do not know. I need a little language such as lovers use, words of one syllable such as children speak when they come into the room and find their mother sewing and pick up some scrap of bright wool, a feather, or a shred of chintz. I need a howl; a cry.

The passage is from Virginia Woolf’s The Waves, a book Mary Ruefle designates as “not one of [her] favorite books” even though her “memory of reading it” at the age of twenty-two on a “plotless day” with the ocean in the distance is one of her favorite memories.  I was nineteen the summer I pulled The Waves off a shelf in my public library, doing so with very little forethought: Woolf’s name was vaguely familiar, and I love the sea. That was enough. It was, I admit, not easy going at first. But by the time I was about a fourth of the way through that book, I knew I would never again feel alone in the world in the same way. I would feel alone a new way, connected to the aloneness of others, and that has made all the difference. In her lecture “Someone Reading a Book,” Ruefle describes in an even more positive way what a good book can bring to light: “We are all one question, and the best answer seems to be love—a connection between things.” I find it touching that Patti Smith’s connection to Virginia Woolf came rather late in her life, and that Woolf’s walking stick, the penultimate Polaroid printed in M Train, prompts her to muse whether, if she continues to outlive everyone, the New York Public Library might entrust her with Woolf’s walking stick, which she would “cherish for her.” (If there’s ever a petition in support of Smith doing just that, I’ll sign it.)

I eventually wrote a dissertation about Woolf, published academic essays about her novels, and have been fortunate to have a career that allows me to teach literature. While I do not, as does Ruefle, tire “of having to talk about literature,” like her, “I didn’t begin writing because I wanted to sit in a room and talk about the construction of subjectivity” in the work of writers I admired—although I can be pretty good at that kind of talk on most days, and I do enjoy it most often, even sometimes enjoy writing about it.

But in dreams begin responsibility.  Was it a lullaby? Was it a requiem? What were the old man and old woman singing in the park?  I will keep listening. I will sing back. I will pay close attention to unbidden words. “I began writing because I had made friends with the dead: they had written to me, in their books, about life on earth,” explains Mary Ruefle, “and I wanted to write back and say yes, house, bridge, river, hair, no, maybe, never, forever.”  And so did I. And so I have, and so I will.

Guest Blog Post: Dixie Salazar

Dixie SalazarBeing both a writer and an artist, I often get the question of how can you switch from one medium to the other? To be honest, I don’t consider that I’m switching. It’s all in your head (or mine, I suppose). There are so many elements that cross over from one medium to the other—metaphor, imagery, form, symbolism, etc. that I don’t think I need to belabor that point. And of course there are very narrative artists such as Magritte or Joseph Cornell. And there are many other artists who are also writers or actors or musicians (William Blake, Terry Allen, Tony Bennett, Patti Smith, to name a motley few). And when I lived in New York, it seemed that everyone was writing a screen play, sculpting and playing in a band or photographing, juggling and tap dancing or putting together dance, jazz, projected painting performances or some variation of any of the above. Doesn’t all creativity spring from the same source?

I suspect that I’m sounding a bit defensive, and I guess I am. I’ve sometimes felt the need to justify being a photographer who prints and hand colors her photos, a painter who works in almost every medium (I started to say except printmaking, and then I remembered that I did those mono-prints once) and a writer of both fiction and poetry. “When do you sleep?” I have translated in my own head into “What kind of freak are you?” or “Maybe you should just do one thing…” (“really well”, my ego defense system adds). And then there’s the “prolific” problem—the most commonly used adjective bounced around my studio by new visitors. I have grown to dislike the word, which I associate with weeds. And I hear myself sounding defensive when I answer that the studio contains years of shows with, yes, unsold works still lurking about, and let’s say you put up a show of thirty pieces and you sell two, and you have at least one show a year, well…you do the math. And of course there’s other work that you do that doesn’t go into a show. Other times I just say, “Yes, I’m productive” (a “p” word I can live with).

But I started out to write about the crossover, which I actually wasn’t that aware of until I had to do a presentation for the writing class of a colleague. I got together slides and poems and suddenly realized almost all of my poems and art pieces had some element that reverberated from one medium to the other. For example, I found paintings and photos with eggs and then discovered any number of poems also hatching eggs right and left. Which came first the painting or the egg, or the poem?

One of my most fun and challenging experiences involved a collaboration with a sound artist titled “Out of the Darkness”, inspired by Roethke’s poem of the same name, projecting double exposed slides of scraps of my paintings and other abstract images with a one to twenty second dissolve, triggered by a tape of new music composed on a (at the time) very sophisticated synthesizer. Part of the fun was setting small plastic figures on fire and photographing them and going on excursions to record the traffic or the wind. The final effect was very much like a film, with images overlapping and dissolving into each other at different speeds.

Maybe I should have gone into film, which combines all the elements: imagery, narrative, sound, metaphor, color. Instead, I’m on the board of Filmworks a local group that brings alternative, independent and foreign films to Fresno. Last year, as a fundraiser for our organization I dreamed up the idea of combining jazz (another love) and poetry and invited a local jazz saxophone artist, Ben Boone as part of a quartet to collaborate with Phil Levine and Peter Everwine. I called it THE JAZZ OF POETRY, THE POETRY OF JAZZ. Herding all the people and elements involved together was harder than herding cats, (even cool ones) but it all evolved as probably the best jazz or poetry does in a very casual, spontaneous, and improvisational way and was a huge success. In fact, Ben and Phil have gone on to other jazz/poetry collaborations.

I confess that sometimes when I’m dry in one medium, I just turn to another which maybe says more about my own obsessive/compulsive tendencies than I’d like. But I do think that dipping into another medium can really open up all kinds of possibilities for your primary medium. If you’re a poet, take up piano or painting or puppetry, not necessarily to start a new career, but to stir up the creative waters. Nothing is more exciting or scary or (scary exciting) than the new blank document. When will you find time to do all this? When will you sleep? I don’t know, but when you do, you might have some wild and crazy dreams.

Guest Blog Post, Michael Davis: On the Art of Talking to Oneself

M. Davis stock photo for postI went through a phase where I was writing from my dreams. I’d wake up and try to get story ideas from the things I’d written on a little notepad during the night. It went like: susurrous–Cambodia–Remember this!–not harm but the other–bullshit–cantaloupe–too true? Sometimes, it looked more like an unfortunate cardiograph, like I was doing a contour drawing with my eyes shut. I’d turn the page upside-down. I’d wonder what certain squiggles meant.

I switched to a voice recorder. This was better but it scared me. The sound of my voice floating up through deep theta was unnerving, made me think of a seance. I’d be sitting at my desk, cup of coffee, yellow steno pad, obsessive-compulsive story writing pen (Uniball Vision Micro 0.5mm–there shall be no other) poised to take down anything promising, and I’d hear myself half in a dream, speaking from a world of ghosts–a man with a green hat who kept telling me about my mother; my old German Shepherd, Shadow, leading me through the rooms of the house I grew up in; ex-girlfriends; former students.

I’d get sentences, whole paragraphs. Some of it was nonsensical. Other things were deeply painful memories I normally tried not to think about. It surprised me that I was dwelling on those things fairly regularly while asleep–and that some part of me had remembered to wake up and drone into the voice recorder. The sleeping Michael was a different person, a stranger who took emotional risks, who went to difficult places while the protective drawbridge of consciousness was temporarily down. I filled notebook after notebook and learned some interesting things about myself. But none of it seemed to apply to my fiction in any meaningful way.

Around this time, I was in the last year of my PhD. I’d published my first book of stories (Gravity, Carnegie Mellon, 2009) the year before and thought it would be a good idea to go to the AWP conference being held in Denver. I brought the voice recorder, but I didn’t continue my subconscious spelunking while there. Instead, I did what everyone does at the AWP conference. I walked around and bought books, listened to panel discussions, talked to people I already knew, stared wistfully out my hotel room window, and burned through my grocery budget for the next three months. In retrospect, however, the trip was justified because I learned something important about writing: I was going to have to write more and do it more quickly.

In the middle of the Colorado Convention Center’s exhibit level where, in a trade show, there would be a local model posing on a combine harvester, there was instead a table full of literary agents. They were from a local agency and had made themselves available for questions. At that time, I had never spoken with an agent. So I took advantage of the opportunity and struck up a conversation about how one markets a novel to the “Big 6” (Random House, Simon & Schuster, Macmillan–you get the idea). I wanted to know if there was a special kind of etiquette agents followed with the biggest publishing houses.

When I asked the question, the young agent in a navy suit that should have been beyond his earning capacity, pushed his glasses up on his nose and looked at me carefully as if he might have to pick me out of a lineup someday. “No,” he said. “There’s no special procedure.” Then he reminded himself to smile. “But if you want to succeed with the trade houses long term, you need to be really productive. Can you write around 300 pages a year?” I said no, I didn’t think so, thanked him, and got out of there as quickly as possible. A book a year? It had taken me six years to produce the stories in my 200-page collection. I had 75 pages of a novel that had taken me most of the previous year.

Later, catching up on some window staring in my hotel room, I tried to envision that level of productivity. One page a day? Writing from canned outlines? Some kind of method book, How to Write a Blockbuster Novel in 2 Weeks and Avoid the ER? I didn’t know. I picked up my voice recorder and started complaining about it to myself. I bitched for around 90 minutes. Then, as I started to get tired, I thought I might turn my rant into a piece of creative nonfiction–something about running up against the cruel commodifying values of the publishing industry in Denver. When I typed up what I’d recorded, I had 35 pages and a brand new idea about how to write more without sacrificing quality.

Since then, I’ve experimented with narrating stories and novel chapters into a voice recorder the way I’d once narrated my dreams. I don’t think I’ll ever be able to write 300 pages of polished fiction a year. But I’ve learned to be more productive this way, to carry some of that dream energy into my conscious drafting. And I’ve learned to hear my own voice the way I hear someone at a literary reading–listening for the caesuras, the paragraphs, the meanings that emerge from syntax.

I tell my students at the Gotham Writers’ Workshop to at least read what they’ve written out loud to themselves. I tell them that their ears will teach them new things about narrative. I say stories were originally meant to be heard and there are lessons about storytelling we can only learn that way. Some of them believe me.

Those of us who have become fascinated with producing spoken drafts have also learned that, while text-based revision is still necessary to produce a finished product, beginning with the spoken word can connect us to a primal source of creative expression. Now I begin every draft by speaking at least part of it into a voice recorder, deliberately tapping into that ghost world of my other self, shaping narrative with the energy of dreams and visions that return to me in my own voice. I listen and write down what I hear, paying close attention to the speaker.

Lucid Dreams: New Work from Rafeal Francisco Salas

Lucid Dreams, photo courtesy of Rafael Salas

If you are in Milwaukee, take time to stop by Rafael Francisco Salas’ new exhibit, Lucid Dreams.

Salas describes his inspiration for the new exhibit as an exploration of “the intersection of portraiture, representation, landscape, and architecture.” He feels that “historically these traditions elicit specific contextual and also visceral responses from viewers, and in combining or exploring them in oblique ways, new responses might arise.”

Lucid Dreams builds on Salas’ past work, which was created from an “emotional or atmospheric place […] that evoked a sense of dreams or nostalgia.” Salas worked to discover how adding new elements to his paintings would change how others reflect on them. Drawing from ideas and elements seen in small towns of the Midwest (Salas’s current home), Salas felt that “our current economic climate and position in the world has created an emotional [and] psychological key that complements themes I have previously explored.”

Presented by Portrait Society Gallery, you can see Rafael Francisco Salas’ newest creations January 20 through March 10, 2012. You can see more of Salas’ artwork in Issue 8.

 

Interview with Julie Hensley

Julie Hensley grew up on a sheep farm in the Shenandoah Valley, but now she makes her home in Kentucky with her husband (the writer R. Dean Johnson) and their two children. Julie has won The Southern Women Writers Emerging Voice Award in both fiction (2005) and poetry (2009). Her work regularly appears in a variety of journals, most recently in Redivider, Ruminate, Superstition Review, PoemMemiorStory, The Pinch and Blackbird, and has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize. Her novel-in-stories, Landfall, won the 2007 Everett Southwest Literature Award. Her chapbook of poems, The Language of Horses, is available from Finishing Line Press.

Superstition Review: What inspired you to write The Language of Horses?

Julie Hensley: My girlhood, like so many, was marked by a period of intense love of horses. When I was very young, my three sisters and I took riding lessons. Saturday mornings, we dawned jodphurs and leather boots, rode around and around a ring of sawdust, and then stopped at Seven Eleven for Slurpees on the way home. When I was nine, after much waiting and saving, my parents bought a farm. Finally, we had our own horses. We could ride them on the overgrown trails that snaked out through the woods behind the barn. We could lounge bareback with a book while the horses grazed.

For my mom, this move marked the fulfillment of her own childhood wishes. Every Christmas, she told us, she had begged her parents for a horse, but had to settle instead for a string of Breyer ponies. Her yearning for horses was a palpable part of my childhood, and as an adolescent, I began to recognize in the fulfillment of that yearning, its metaphoric power. It wasn’t surprising that our move to the farm heralded my mother’s return to college and her development of a career as a teacher. Horses were desire. They were imagination. They were autonomy. They were the things that, I was just then beginning to understand, women ultimately have to fashion for themselves.

SR: The poems have very vivid memories and stories. Are they connected to your own personal memories and what made you want to share these certain moments?

JH: The poems are highly autobiographical. My husband Bob (R. Dean Johnson), who himself writes nonfiction, loves to tease me when I give him a new poem to read. He says, “Huh. Why don’t you take the line breaks out of that and submit it to Brevity.” While there is usually a narrative moment to my poems, and these are no exception, it is not story as much as raw, highly sensory imagery which spawns a poem for me. For instance, while “Monsoon Season” recounts the memory of a hike Bob and I did in the San Francisco Peaks, the poem really began with the immediate smell of vanilla rising from wet pine bark.

Once I realized horses could work as an extended metaphor, I did begin actively siphoning imagery around that theme, which led to specific memories such as my sister teaching me to French braid on a horse’s tail.

SR: In your fiction piece, “Expecting,” your descriptions are still very poetic. Is writing fiction more of a challenge for you compared to poems?

JH: I would have to say that fiction is harder for me. Or perhaps it is more fitting to admit that I simply work harder at fiction. My MFA is actually in fiction. Poetry has always been my secondary genre. Because I teach, I dedicate summers to fiction–for several summers in a row, I have been trying to complete a novel. When I feel hung up on the fiction, rather than sitting and fuming with creative wheels spinning, I will open a new file and begin a poem. During the academic year when I teach four classes at a time, it is difficult to drop fully into the world of my fiction, so during the winter I revise fiction and write new poems. I’m grateful to have my poetry because moving back and forth between the two genres releases pressure.

SR: The Language of Horses brings the reader to many different beautiful settings like Virginia, Kansas, and Phoenix. What does traveling offer to the pieces you write?

JH: It’s funny. My dreams take a while to catch up with my actual life. For instance, I have a nine-month-old daughter, but she has yet to appear in my dream life. I moved to Kentucky three years ago, yet my home here has really only just begun to formulate the backdrop of my dreams. I think my writing life works the same way. When I was a student in Arizona I constantly wrote of Virginia and Kansas. When I moved to Oklahoma, I wrote about the desert. Now that I live in Kentucky, I have begun to write about the plains. For me, being away from a place breeds a yearning that is quite productive to the creative process. I like to cultivate that yearning, to play with the power of dislocation.

I think that’s part of the power of low and brief-residency MFA programs such as the one in which I teach at Eastern Kentucky University—they allow emerging writers to feel the beautiful strangeness of a new place and the warm yearning for home that accompanies it. Two years ago, I traveled with students to San Miguel de Allende, Mexico, and I actually crafted “Expecting” there, sipping espresso each morning in Café Montenegro. This summer, I’ll accompany students to Edinburgh, Scotland. Maybe that trip will help me make progress on my novel.

SR: What are you writing now? What are you reading?

JH: It’s winter, so I’m writing poems. I’m working simultaneously on two cycles. One, with the working title Viable, explores motherhood and fertility. The other, Breaking Ground, channels the voices of a fictional couple—Gracie and Nohl—whose marriage dissolves into physical abuse as they build a farmhouse together.

I just finished Jennifer Egan’s A Visit from the Goon Squad, a book which absolutely blew my mind. In general, I’m a fan of novels-in-stories. (“Expecting” is actually the capstone piece in Landall, a novel-in-stories which I have just begun to circulate.) Egan’s novel is so imaginative. She inhabits the lives of an array of characters so fully, and she balances decades of branching relationships with such flawless, nuanced control. I just began and am thoroughly enjoying Nancy Jensen’s The Sisters, a sweeping novel that moves, through six different perspectives, from 1920s Kentucky to Vietnam era Indiana. I’m also reading collections of poems in preparation for a poetry workshop I’ll be teaching in the spring—this week it’s Beckian Fritz Goldberg’s Lie Awake Lake and Claudia Emerson’s Figure Studies.