Mark Strand, “With Only the Stars to Guide Us”

photo: Timothy Greenfield-Sanders

Whenever the giants turned in for the night, taking their huge toys with them, we were left nothing to play with, and slept under sofas and chairs. The gift of bigness would never be ours. This was a truth against which we had tried again and again to turn our tiny backs, and each time had failed. Undone by sorrow, some of us found solace in prayer, and others, like ourselves, chose to follow wild dogs through the dark, moose-crowded woods of the northland, nursing our hurt until we dropped.

Almost Invisible is a collection of short prose poems by former U.S. poet laureate Mark Strand published at the beginning of 2012. It collects works from, among other publications, Slate (“The Engima of the Infinitesimal” and “Every So Many Hundred Years Hence“), LIttle Star (“The Students of the Ineffable” and “The Triumph of the Infinite”), and Poetry (“Futility in Key West,” “Mystery and Solitude in Topeka,” “No Words Can Describe It,” “The Minister of Culture Gets His Wish,” and “The Mysterious Arrival of an Unusual Letter“).

Oh, and five poems in Boston Review, where Nicholas Christopher praises Strand for his “clean lines, taut narratives, and carefully framed mise-en-scènes.” I’d add only that they have for me the surreal specificity of dream images—sharp, distinct tableaux of things that shouldn’t quite fit together yet somehow do, and in doing so impress themselves upon your memory.

5 July 2012 | poetry |

A Sneak Preview of Beatrice #2

Here’s a short excerpt from the conversation I had with Jodi Picoult in the spring of 2012, just as her novel Lone Wolf was coming out. Lone Wolf, like its immediate predecessor Sing You Home, is told through multiple first-person narrators—one of several complex and often innovative literary techniques I’d noticed once I began reading Picoult’s novels in the wake of the Franzenfreude debate. So we talked a bit about how a literary device that was once considered radical and avant-garde can now turn up in commercial fiction without any fanfare—and, in another part of the conversation not included in this clip, she told me a bit more about how and when she decides to use it to tell the story she’s telling in a given book.

This interview will be published in the second issue of the “enhanced ebook” version of Beatrice later in July 2012, as a feature-length Q&A accompanied by a short video clip—not this one, but an entirely different segment of the conversation. Picoult will be joined in Beatrice #2 by debut novelists Alice Albinia and Nick Dybek. iPad users will be able to purchase the ebook from Apple’s iBookstore for $2.99. (I’m working on also making these ebooks available to readers with other tablet devices, such as the Kindle Fire or the Nook Tablet, as soon as affordably possible.) Keep an eye here for the news of its release, or join the Beatrice mailing list and you’ll get a more direct announcement.

4 July 2012 | interviews |