The Antioch Review back issues from January 2006:
Silver bullet.(editorial)(Editorial)
Jan 01, 2006; ... While doing a Goggle search I discovered that the term "silver bullet" referred to a vibrator, a motorcycle manufactured in New Zealand, and a reference in a 1987 book on technology by Fred Brooks that asserted the "day of the technological silver bullet is over." Bruce Jackson's lead ...
Silver bullets.
Jan 01, 2006; ... Billy's Gun In late August 1972, my son Michael, then ten years old, and I were in a junk store near Fort Sumner, New Mexico. The owner pointed to an old pistol in a locked glass case. He said it had once belonged to Billy the Kid, whose grave was nearby. I said that if Billy ...
Boarders.(Short Story)
Jan 01, 2006; ... The room my father rented on Cherry Street was dark and cool and smelled like him, a bachelor who ate his meals out and had his laundry done by a Chinese woman on Elm Street. The starch she used on his work shirts mixed with the salt of his skin and the oil he used to slick back his fine ...
The Anglo-American vision of Raymond Aron.
Jan 01, 2006; ... It is both daunting and dangerous to write of Raymond Aron's work. Here is a figure who wrote hundreds of journalistic articles for Figaro, L'Express, and Commentaire, an equal number of articles and essays for professional journals, and several dozen books, at least some of which, ...
The red shoes: Bobby Short in the south of France.
Jan 01, 2006; ... I'd been a guest at Bobby Short's Cote d'Azur villa for several days before I attached any significance to the red shoes. "Shall I wear them?" he'd asked me. There'd been no smile, no hint of irony, so the oblique reference to the famed Lermontov ballet, The Red Shoes, did not ...
The complete liar.(Short Story)
Jan 01, 2006; ... "David, why don't you ever tell the truth?" My mother's tone was exasperated. She didn't know what to do with me. "What do you mean, Mother?" I knew very well what she meant, but this was my usual response. I was, after all, eleven years old, and I did not yet have at my ...
Chickens.(Short Story)
Jan 01, 2006; ... Betty I didn't work like a coolie my entire life to spend my last years begging God to go ahead and throw me in the grave because I've got to listen to that g.d. rooster at the crack of dawn every morning trying to let some chicken know who wears the pants. I ought to go over ...
Letter from Ouagadougou.
Jan 01, 2006; ... <Pre> "New Yorkers have everything, so nothing fascinates them."--Tepilit Ole Saitoti, The Worlds of a Maasai Warrior. </Pre> Poring over the world atlas as boys, my brothers and I had chosen Ouagadougou, Upper Volta, as the weirdest-sounding, most exotic spot imaginable on earth ....
New Year, With Nipperkin.(Poem)
Jan 01, 2006; ... <Pre> And so the world begins again In mild disarray Where the best laid plans of mice and men It's said, "gang aft agley." "Gang aft agley"--that sounds just right-- Strangulated, glottal, Where violence meets backwardness Summarily throttled. So merrily and merrily The ...
Meditation Ending With a Kine From Celan.(Poem)
Jan 01, 2006; ... <Pre> First, empty the room of your possessions. Loaded into wheelbarrows, beds of busted chevys, shopping bags tied with rags onto horse and mule; send each on its course. Then don't you move an inch but leave your mind and stream like refugees across the border of ...
Poem in the Manner of Jorge Luis Borges.(Poem)
Jan 01, 2006; ... <Pre> The Braille flowers of remote perfume. --Juan Manuel Roca In the library of the blind I know another man with my name but without my memories moves my queen's pawn. The flowers on the table are so fragrant the odor is stronger than the dust of books, longer-lived than the ...
Poem in the Lusty Manner.(Poem)
Jan 01, 2006; ... <Pre> She was blonde on top, a brunette below, my lovely Greek goddess, who told me she was Jewish, but what did I know? She was thirty, and not too young for me. She was thirty, and shaved her pussy and laughed. Doesn't everybody? I wanted to fuck her, not ...
Poem in the Manner of Robert Lowell.(Poem)
Jan 01, 2006; ... <Pre> I don't believe what I just saw. My hands touched what my heart hurt not. Yet why not say what? Spiders in nuclear clocks break no laws. Skunks on summer eves tie no knots. I don't believe what I just saw. Couples neck, my own neck's hot. My eyes can see the work of my ...
The Annotated Dog.(Poem)
Jan 01, 2006; ... <Pre> Her (1) name is Ms. Annabel Johnson--I call her Annie, (nee Kona, her name before she was rescued (2).) She is black and tan and white (3) and brown and persistent. She never blames (4) or demands like other bitches (5) I have known, though she was abused and neglected (6) for the ...
Cat Calls.(Poem)
Jan 01, 2006; ... <Pre> Meesh meesh Tun tun Neanu Tun tun Neanu--neanu Meesh meesh Ita boo? ita boo? Entu entu Eenu--eenu ...
Ethics, a Lament.(Poem)
Jan 01, 2006; ... <Pre> One floor down, the washing machine groans, churning its grey clot of socks and tattered underwear; the well pump clanks in tandem, sucks up another icy load from its stony subterra chamber echoing with clicks and rumbled machinations; and at every slurping ...
Prayer Before Sleep.(Poem)
Jan 01, 2006; ... <Pre> Straight A's on arithmetic quizzes, your cheek gets ground into the concrete down here, Sir. Thank You for sending only Your smallest monsters to find me and Your giant silence, thank You for that, within it I accept that the Beatles won't sing in my rec room ever and my ...
Greece in '68.(Poem)
Jan 01, 2006; ... <Pre> They said, "Yes, you had a reservation if we had room. But we do not." Midnight, the Plaka, inky as the olive-excremental essence seeping from the streets. We none of us would leave, so they phoned around at last and found us rooms in the new high-rise Hotel Artemis. And by noon ...
Pulp Town.(Poem)
Jan 01, 2006; ... <Pre> Town smells like barbecue & farts Rancid steam & dump burning smoke, Old perfume on sex sweated bodies. Clouds look like clouds but are disguised Drugged, low & close like a poisoned pillow, Ozone holes tethered over main street, Part of a killing jar for a way of life, A ...
Tortebresse.(Poem)
Jan 01, 2006; ... <Pre> The farm burned that night. In the stable, the man counts the dead: ten burned cows. While the meadows are still so beautiful! It's spring and the smoke that rises ...
Spring Does Covers & Original Numbers.(Poem)
Jan 01, 2006; ... <Pre> Spring is the 24-hour-a-day jam session of the dead who live in the basement apartment next door. We never see them go out for groceries or lunch dates. Their notes rise from the ground. Those daffodils are the blare of Miles Davis's dented unmutable trumpet. Of course, ...
Demeter: a White Spring.(Poem)
Jan 01, 2006; ... <Pre> Before the mechanical clock-- Long, long before--the clock Was woman, her uterus, The devise of measure, Meter ... mother. "You see, I had a choice." Beyond the sealed window, The whirling snow. My friend went on, "Can you keep a secret? I was pregnant And did ...
Mexican chocolates.(Short Story)
Jan 01, 2006; ... Mary-Ann thinks of San Diego as a kaleidoscope. She thinks of it as a naval base, a Spanish mission, a trading post. She thinks of it as palm trees, sailboats, an airport. She thinks of it as a zoo. She knows it's where she works. She knows it's where people do things. But she doesn't ...
The train.(Short Story)
Jan 01, 2006; ... "Would you mind if I sit here?" the man asks, gesturing to the empty seat next to Beth. The man is slight, his tanned features tiny within his face. His eyes are a white blue study. He is wearing a tweed coat, a white shirt, and cowboy boots. A brown fedora dangles from his left hand. Beth ...
Career day.(Short Story)
Jan 01, 2006; ... Don Jones, class of '80, obscurely notorious minor master of homoliterotica, took naturally to St. John the Evangelist's halls again, almost as if he'd never left them. Aided by early-morning cunning in his selection of clothes, he re-blended seamlessly into the babbling brook of Catholic ...
The Landmark Hotel.(Short Story)
Jan 01, 2006; ... On the day that C.C.'s mother did not meet Janis Joplin, "A Boy Named Sue" was a hit record. By Johnny Cash. Ceci hated that song. C.C.'s mother named her C.C. for C.C. Rider, the Janis Joplin version, but her friends all thought that her name was Ceci, short for Cecile. Ceci called her ...
Poetry today.(Last News of Mr. Nobody: Selected Poems)(Book Review)
Jan 01, 2006; ... No fewer than ten translators have discovered Emmanuel Moses, a Franco-Israeli poet with a distinct and original voice. I refer to the volume Last News of Mr. Nobody, a selection of poems from Metiers (1989), Les Batiments de la compagnie asiatique (1993), Opus 100 (1996), Le Present ...
The Catholic Revival in English Literature, 1845-1961: Newman, Hopkins, Belloc, Chesterton, Greene, Waugh.(The Catholic Revolution: New Wine, Old Wineskins, and the Second Vatican Council)(Book Review)
Jan 01, 2006; ... The Catholic Revival in English Literature, 1845-1961: Newman, Hopkins, Belloc, Chesterton, Greene, Waugh by Ian Ker. University of Notre Dame Press, 231 pp., $25.00 (paper). The Catholic Revolution: New Wine, Old Wineskins, and the Second Vatican Council by Andrew Greeley ....
Ahmad's War, Ahmad's Peace: Surviving Under Saddam, Dying in the New Iraq.(Brief Article)(Book Review)
Jan 01, 2006; ... Ahmad's War. Ahmad's Peace: Surviving Under Saddam, Dying in the New Iraq by Michael Goldfarb. Carroll & Graf, 354 pp., $25.95. Goldfarb, the veteran public radio correspondent, went to Iraq on the eve of the 2003 U.S. invasion. Upon arriving in the Kurdish safe zone, Goldfarb hired a ...
Bastards and Foundlings: Illegitimacy in 18th-Century England.(Book Review)
Jan 01, 2006; ... Bastards and Foundlings, Illegitimacy in 18th-Century England by Lisa Zunshine. Ohio State University Press, 228 pp., $44.95. In a Western literary tradition that includes Shakespeare's Caliban and Dostoyevsky's Smerdyakov, bastards are depicted as humpbacked, boozy, lecherous, syphilitic, ...
A Day, a Night, Another Day, Summer: Stories.(Brief Article)(Book Review)
Jan 01, 2006; ... A Day, A Night, Another Day, Summer: Stories by Christine Schutt. TriQuarterly Books, 155 pp. $22.95. The stories in Schutt's new collection have that same haunting quality as her previous collections. In the first story, Jean's husband disappears and leaves her with two small children to ...
The Identity Club.(Brief Article)(Book Review)
Jan 01, 2006; ... The Identity Club by Richard Burgin. Ontario Review Press, 330 pp., $24.95. Over and over, Burgin writes the same story: A misfit, one of those gray souls who is neither bright nor stupid but painfully lonely and maladjusted, tries in desperation to find sex or connection, often with a ...
A Perfect Stranger.(Brief Article)(Book Review)
Jan 01, 2006; ... A Perfect Stranger by Roxana Robinson. Random House, 235 pp., $23.95. Robinson's prose is clean, unshowy, controlled; her characters are people we recognize. The best of this collection is its opening story, "Family Christmas," a quiet tale of class conflict told by a woman remembering ...
The Secret of M. Dulong.(Brief Article)(Book Review)
Jan 01, 2006; ... The Secret of M. Dulong by Colette Inez. University of Wisconsin Press, 256 pp., $29.95. One danger of having lived a harrowing life is that such a life rarely fits comfortably within the covers of a book. Memoirs that transcend the "oh-what-a-fascinating-story-you-must-write-about-it" ...
Singing the Gospel: Lutheran Hymns and the Success of the Reformation.(Brief Article)(Book Review)
Jan 01, 2006; ... Singing the Gospel: Lutheran Hymns and the Success of the Reformation by Christopher Boyd Brown. Harvard University Press, 298 pp., $39.95. This detailed study explores the powerful influence of spiritual song on popular culture, verifying this seemingly obvious thesis in a painstakingly ...
Migration: New and Selected Poems.(Brief Article)(Book Review)
Jan 01, 2006; ... Migration: New & Selected Poems by W. S. Merwin. Copper Canyon Press, 570 pp., $40.00. Eight new poems and selections from fifteen books published between 1952 and 2001 comprise the text of this very solid volume. In college Merwin dreamed of becoming a poet and admired Richard Blackmur ...
Songs for Two Voices.(Brief Article)(Book Review)
Jan 01, 2006; ... Songs for Two Voices by Bruce Smith. University of Chicago Press, 72 pp., $22.50. As baseball bats were made slimmer and lighter so they could be swung faster and the ball hit farther, so Smith's poetry is trimmed and crafted to its verbal basics in order to knock our times out of the ...
In the Absent Everyday.(Brief Article)(Book Review)
Jan 01, 2006; ... In the Absent Everyday by Tsering Wangmo Dhompa. Apogee Press, 81 pp., $14.95 (paper). According to the author's note, Dhompa is a Tibetan-American, raised in India and Nepal. There are many ways to describe these richly observed, almost minimalist poems. One is to say they chronicle an ...
Any Holy City.(Book Review)
Jan 01, 2006; ... Any Holy City by Mark Conway. Silverfish Review Press, 76 pp., $14.95 (paper). Winner of the 2003 Gerald Cable Book Award, Conway's first collection features vivid, surprising poems that follow the difficult passage to a "third eternity," the journey itself both a way and destination ...
A Palace of Pearls.(Brief Article)(Book Review)
Jan 01, 2006; ... A Palace of Pearls by Jane Miller. Copper Canyon Press, 96 pp., $15.00 (paper). In Miller's book-length sequence, the belief that "the imagination repairs" vies with the certainty that "the poem restores nothing," and if at one moment the poet lacerates herself questioning her poem's ...
The Sugar Mile.(Book Review)
Jan 01, 2006; ... The Sugar Mile by Glyn Maxwell. Houghton Mifflin, 144 pp., $23.00. "This guy walks into a bar": the tag line of joke infamy galvanizes the plot of Maxwell's eighth book of poems, where the chance meeting of two transplanted Englishmen in an Irish bar in pre-9/11 Manhattan becomes the ...