Selected Publications

And even if one day blurred into the next, made blurrier by the rain, time would keep passing and time would do its work, and it was time not to waste the gift.

In the century before this one, I was a teacher of young children just learning how to read and write. Daily, missives arrived on my desk, filled with inverted letters, missing spaces, best guesses.

Whichever direction you take, should you find yourself at an unexpected edge, go ahead and give that ladder a rest. Dip your toes in the water and look out over the vast expanse. You just might see a bridge to another shore.

The summons arrives through a slot in the door, boldface warning in the upper right-hand corner . . .

Death and Other Holidays begins in the spring, and it also begins with a death—an upending of usual seasonal expectations: “They say you’re supposed to get this miraculous sense of renewal and promise, but it never happens that way either,” observes April early in the novella.

Lucid, lyrical, and keenly beautiful, the poetry of Anise Koltz is a poetry I wanted to read well before I had the vocabulary to do so. The bare truth of it gleams, as if carved from ancient ice, or constructed of meticulously arranged river stones.

poems|translations|interscriptions from the early lyric poetry of Christine de Pizan

In the summer of 2015, I opened the covers of a book and read aloud to a sizable audience inside an elegant black box theater. The title of the book was At the Border of Wilshire & Nobody, and the name on the front cover was mine.

How does our language about any one particular event shift from conveyance to legend, to a story we tell over and over again—like a star, outliving the moment of its birth?

A poetics of the étrangère is an inquiry, an exploration, a wandering. It seeks not to define answers but to propose questions. It resides in the margins, whose edges hinge on silence, song, incantation.