Project MUSE®: New England Review - Latest Articles
https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/541
Project MUSE®: Latest articles in New England Review.daily12024-03-29T00:00:00-05:00text/htmlen-USVol. 32 (2011) through current issueLatest Articles: New England ReviewTWOProject MUSE®New England Review2161-91311053-1297Latest articles in New England Review. Feed provided by Project MUSE®Editor's Note
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/922918
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Most nights after dinner, I walk the four blocks to our local elementary school. It's where I take my kids in the morning, but at night the playground is empty of children. The tower of the jungle gym rises into the dark like a skeletal steeple. There is a kidney-shaped dog park flanking the tennis courts, where mutts and purebreds dart in all directions, panting and barking, as a tennis ball plucks out the flattest melody from one side of the court to the other. I note the scene, more boisterous than I'd like for a night walk, and cross the dirt track that circles all and make my way to the baseball field. I don't like baseball, but I like open space and I like to walk into the shadows just beyond first base
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2024-03-29T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/541/image/coversmallEditor's Note2024-03-28text/htmlen-USEditor's Note2024-03-282024TWOProject MUSE®54982024-03-29T00:00:00-05:002024-03-28Was He Free? Was He Happy?
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/922919
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With/for/after/Vallejo's TrilceNitrogen is gone, phosphate is gone, potassium is goneAll the key nutrients essential for plant growth are missingThe emcee was scolded for comparing the disappearance of the plants to the Holocaust  the Hitler of the skies he said of global warming    he never used {our} words again …I digressI had a dream the other nightI was running through a small transparent canal when I was stopped at the border between the optic nerve disc and the lensI was slowly becoming invaginatedThe border patrol agent guarding the lens warned methe surface is folding in on itselfHe said you are like the nation and the nation can best be represented as a cavity, a pouch, or a tubeThen in the name of the
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2024-03-29T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/541/image/coversmallWas He Free? Was He Happy?2024-03-28text/htmlen-USWas He Free? Was He Happy?2024-03-282024TWOProject MUSE®199482024-03-29T00:00:00-05:002024-03-28A Theory of History
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/922920
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Explore, expand, exploit, exterminate. This was how Oliver Hall passed his time during quarantine. He'd fallen off the wagon with unexpected force, and he'd been off it for eighteen months, living in his late father's unlivable hovel in South Salt Lake, surrounded by empty bottles, aggregating 520 days of headache and heartburn and hangover. He started drinking to mourn the end of his friendship—and working relationship—with Daniel Erlich, a famous artist and filmmaker. He continued drinking because that's how it usually went with drunks, though this was a special kind of bender, the kind you don't expect to come back from. In March of that year, pandemic arrived as the grim late-winter snow melted. And earthquakes
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2024-03-29T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/541/image/coversmallA Theory of History2024-03-28text/htmlen-USA Theory of History2024-03-282024TWOProject MUSE®606452024-03-29T00:00:00-05:002024-03-28Junk Temples
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/922922
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The world is a disappointment.The world is a disappointment, but there are means of escape. Doors to walk through. Secret doors, trap doors, mystery doors. For example:When I was a child, I began to hear music in color. On the radio, the Beatles' "A Day in the Life" played on Thanksgiving, presumably because it was long enough for the deejay to take a break. (Toilet time. Cigarette time.) I saw:Blue, magenta, white, orange … but the song begins in blue and ends in blue before a final explosion of white.In the literature of others, the leading color of metaphor is blue. In Joan Didion's Blue Nights, written in the wake of the death of a beloved daughter, the central mood recurs alongside the evening hour the English
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2024-03-29T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/541/image/coversmallJunk Temples2024-03-28text/htmlen-USJunk Temples2024-03-282024TWOProject MUSE®569902024-03-29T00:00:00-05:002024-03-28The Empty Child
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/922924
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When Mrs. Thompson first saw the empty child in Food & Stuff, her favorite mega-store, she thought she'd made up the girl out of nothing at all. She'd done that before and was pretty good at it, she didn't mind telling people. She reached for a crinkly bag of peppermints, then shook her head—wrong kind—and put it back. Those kiosks for sweets were popping up all over the place, not just jammed in with the serious, sensible food, not just a proper candy aisle all to itself like in the old days.In fact, it turned out to be a real girl but the empty part was real too—not as in dumb or anything. It was more an all-knowing expectation Mrs. Thompson instantly understood in certain movie stars, a small vacant spot to put
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2024-03-29T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/541/image/coversmallThe Empty Child2024-03-28text/htmlen-USThe Empty Child2024-03-282024TWOProject MUSE®204202024-03-29T00:00:00-05:002024-03-28Peter Piper and the Celtic Viper
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/922926
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Five decades into my life cycle, I am left with just two scenes from my early years. The mind salvages, or jettisons, what it must. There is no script. Just some things that stick.In the first sequence, I am being cradled by warm turquoise waters. I am below the surface, entranced by the sun's rays filtering kaleidoscopically through sandy plumes swirling like mineral dervishes. Then I am plucked out of my blissful levitation and carried to the beach. The cold breeze on my moist skin is a shock, like being born into the hard dry world a second time. This was in Antigua, and I was just shy of two. I'd been wading in the shallows, when a wave lifted me off my feet and the backwash carried me out to deeper waters. My
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2024-03-29T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/541/image/coversmallPeter Piper and the Celtic Viper2024-03-28text/htmlen-USPeter Piper and the Celtic Viper2024-03-282024TWOProject MUSE®323392024-03-29T00:00:00-05:002024-03-28Knees as a Sign of Wonder, and: Age of Pomegranates as Dream
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/922927
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2024-03-29T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/541/image/coversmallKnees as a Sign of Wonder, and: Age of Pomegranates as Dream2024-03-28text/htmlen-USKnees as a Sign of Wonder, and: Age of Pomegranates as Dream2024-03-282024TWOProject MUSE®82282024-03-29T00:00:00-05:002024-03-28M. & I
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/922928
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Madame M. had been married to more than eighty men. They looked identical: had they ever gathered in the same place, she could have lined them up like paper dolls, holding hands, cut oh-so-carefully from a single folded sheet—but they never did. Instead, each replaced the last, as he had replaced the man before him, and he the man before him, and on and on until there had been one man, her husband, the real one, long since lost to the distant haze of memory. She could hardly recall his face—though, of course, the same face peered at her now, its mouth frowning, its eyes concerned. The same face, and yet she knew—she knew!—that it wasn't his. Wasn't him. He had been abducted, murdered, who knew.Who knew? She did."If
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2024-03-29T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/541/image/coversmallM. & I2024-03-28text/htmlen-USM. & I2024-03-282024TWOProject MUSE®349092024-03-29T00:00:00-05:002024-03-28If You Can Believe It
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/922930
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The farm is still there. In Northwestern Australia. It's always been a profitable concern. At least thirty thousand acres now, possibly more. When the woman I'll call Olivia was still a girl, the adults ran the operation, while the kids ran wild. The place was so isolated that trips to Perth, where Olivia's maternal grandparents lived and where Olivia stayed during the school year, often required a plane ride. But Perth was never home. The farm was home.And it's on the farm where Olivia first had the dream. Really the dreams, for they came most every night, the summer she was ten. It took her years to understand all the aspects of the dreams, or you could say it took a strange coincidence. And another strange
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2024-03-29T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/541/image/coversmallIf You Can Believe It2024-03-28text/htmlen-USIf You Can Believe It2024-03-282024TWOProject MUSE®660702024-03-29T00:00:00-05:002024-03-28The Gift of a Daughter from Kanyādān (1983)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/922932
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Mid-morning. An old block of flats in a middle-class neighborhood. A drawing room, not very spacious, but neat and trim. On the walls, framed photographs of Mahatma Gandhi, Acharya Narendra Dev, Yusuf Meher Ali, Sane Guruji. A few mementoes of assorted sizes, representing different regions of the country, are arranged conspicuously around the room. The overall image is one of tranquility and self-assurance. nath deolalikar is speaking on the phone. He is nearly sixty years old but still full of vitality. jyoti (about twenty) and jaiprakash (about twenty-three) are his two children. Jyoti sits doing some secretarial work for her father; Jaiprakash sits repairing a gadget that he has taken apart.(Shouting on the
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2024-03-29T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/541/image/coversmallThe Gift of a Daughter from Kanyādān (1983)2024-03-28text/htmlen-USThe Gift of a Daughter from Kanyādān (1983)2024-03-282024TWOProject MUSE®425352024-03-29T00:00:00-05:002024-03-28Mirror, and: Jane
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/922934
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It's the third time your son's called you that evening. You're at a bar two towns over, a dive bar, the sort of place you swear you hate. The bartender is attractive, though, and your husband moved out three months ago. He left a wilted plant and a hissing cat.Family? the bartender says, looking at your buzzing phone.Jordan, you say, and you flip the screen over. Grown son, you add.You order another drink. As the bartender turns away, you catch sight of yourself in the mirror above the rum. When you think of Jordan, you think of how spectacularly he grew into the nose you gave him, how many times his voice cracked before it settled into the rich baritone of his father's. All your life, you've wanted to be a house
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2024-03-29T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/541/image/coversmallMirror, and: Jane2024-03-28text/htmlen-USMirror, and: Jane2024-03-282024TWOProject MUSE®95952024-03-29T00:00:00-05:002024-03-28Ghost of an Old Injury from The Book of Harrison
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/922936
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There is so much to say about Harrison Wynn, it gets stuck on the way out. For one, the day I learned she was dead, my eyesight changed. I want to call it "vision," but it was eyesight. Straight lines began to warp—lines of type on a Xeroxed sheet on my desk, instructions for turning our grades in. I already knew how to turn my grades in. From the hall came students' too-loud exuberance. I closed the door and adjusted the arms of my chair, ergonomically designed for a different body type.It was May, the end of the school year, when I'm usually blithe unto silly. Three months without classes, one more summer out of childhood. But Harrison was dead. Passed away was what Freya said on the phone. That was all she could
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2024-03-29T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/541/image/coversmallGhost of an Old Injury from The Book of Harrison2024-03-28text/htmlen-USGhost of an Old Injury from The Book of Harrison2024-03-282024TWOProject MUSE®451802024-03-29T00:00:00-05:002024-03-28Ed Thinks of Everything
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/922938
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Husband Ed accidentally severed a couple fingers off his left hand and there's no way he's going to the ER so please let's not even go down that road, Tanya Chandra posts.Ed once worked for the hospitals and saw things he wasn't meant to see. The lawyer would tell me to stop right there, Tanya Chandra replies.We understand this is the sort of inner-ring subdivision where private-leaning residents help each other live their best lives regardless of what those lives look like. We're hoping to do most of this at home. If you hear me we're at 5761 Pinecrest just in case, Tanya Chandra replies.Sorry won't be able to let anyone in the house anytime soon because the windows and doors all tripwire once the alarm activates.
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2024-03-29T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/541/image/coversmallEd Thinks of Everything2024-03-28text/htmlen-USEd Thinks of Everything2024-03-282024TWOProject MUSE®347552024-03-29T00:00:00-05:002024-03-28Witness to a Century
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/922939
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A feeling of inexpressible unrest then began to ferment in all young hearts. Condemned to repose by the sovereigns of the world, given up to vulgar pedantries of all sorts, to laziness and to lassitude, young men saw receding from them the foaming billows against which they had prepared their arms. All these oil-rubbed gladiators felt an unbearable wretchedness in the depths of their souls. The richest became libertines; those of moderate fortune adopted a calling, and resigned themselves either to the gown or to the sword; the poorest heedlessly rushed into enthusiasm, into tall talk, into the frightful sea of aimless action. As human weakness seeks association and as men are gregarious by nature, politics became
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2024-03-29T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/541/image/coversmallWitness to a Century2024-03-28text/htmlen-USWitness to a Century2024-03-282024TWOProject MUSE®102302024-03-29T00:00:00-05:002024-03-28Contributors' Notes
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/922940
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Marianne Boruch has written eleven books of poems, most recently Bestiary Dark (Copper Canyon Press, 2021); four essay collections, including Sing by the Burying Ground (North-western University Press, 2024); two memoirs, The Glimpse Traveler (Indiana University Press, 2011) and, forthcoming, The Figure Going Imaginary, made of notes taken in Gross Human Anatomy (the medical school's "cadaver lab") and a Life Drawing class, an experience that triggered poems in her eighth collection, Cadaver, Speak (Copper Canyon Press, 2014). Among her honors are the Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award and fellowships/residencies from the Guggenheim Foundation, the NEA, the Rockefeller Foundation's Bellagio Center, MacDowell, Yaddo
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2024-03-29T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/541/image/coversmallContributors' Notes2024-03-28text/htmlen-USContributors' Notes2024-03-282024TWOProject MUSE®152832024-03-29T00:00:00-05:002024-03-28