Maybe I’m homesick or maybe I’ve just sold out, but I’ve stopped distinguishing between the states that make up the great green Midwest I call home.

April is national poetry month, but a lot of people don't know or care about it. Completely understandable. Many teachers introduce us to poetry as if it were a fine science.

The short story form is a special kind of animal. It is the form that students of fiction are made to learn first, as though crafting a finely-spun tale of less than twenty or so pages is the first step toward tackling the beast that is the novel. But this is mostly nonsense.

In my house there is a library. It used to be called the playroom, back when I was very small and very young and learned what Don Quixote was by watching the Wishbone episode. It was a library then, too, but I didn’t really notice. It has shelves for ...

A snap. Audible, no, probably not. But tenable, real. Crack. The sound that comes when you break. I know. I broke two days ago. It was afternoon, or evening, I’m not certain. Snapped from everything. I was a leaf, all else a branch—a tornado snapped our connecting twig ...

On the seventieth anniversary of Ataturk’s death I was in the mountains between Van and Diyarbakir with a baby on my lap and her three year old brother stretched out on the seat behind me while their mother tried to sleep, the silk scarf slipping from her hair.

I am on my balcony. I have been here for three days and two nights. It was my wife who put me here. It happened like this:

At dawn, when we wake, she wakes, I see: she, simulacrum of sweetie, presently bovine sweetie, clodhopper lovely, trundle fatly to her boudoir to assess the damage: six digits, the tally. These days, my girl: formidable haunches, breasts sapped of buoyancy, deflated balloon breasts, gobs of fatty skin where there ought only to be loveliness. She squirms into her negligee, once loose-fit, casual, today perilously taut, and thumps into the kitchen. When she walks her feet slap the floor.

James Frey might be the most inarticulate author alive. Also, if he is not one of the most boring, he is clearly the most bored, and his prose is so harried, so egregiously imprecise, that it reads as if it is trying to flee the very tedium of the subject matter.

“Do you see those women standing by the river, their reflections cut up by the waves, under the shadow of pierless piles?”

The first time you die, almost always, you get a feeling in the pit of your stomach, as though someone’s taken the bottom out. It feels like it does when an airplane is landing with you inside, as though all the strings of muscle and tendon holding your insides in place are being strummed by someone’s thumb.

A Poem.