After a minute, he came back and handed me the phone.
The line was silent.
“Yes,” I said.
“You. Robert Ruen.” It was a declaration, not a question—an older man’s voice, loud and somehow childish, the accent unmistakably Vietnamese. “Say something to me.”
“With a novel, the end felt so far off, always beyond the horizon, and that was a terrifying feeling. Eventually, I had to teach myself to be okay with that, to turn the uncertainty and fear into a productive state of mind.”
Our first night at sea, you cried for your father. You buried your face in my lap and clenched a fist to your ear as if to shut out my voice. I reminded you that we had to leave home and he could not make the trip with us. He would catch up with us soon. But you kept shaking your head. I couldn’t tell if I was failing to comfort you or if you were already, at four years old, refusing to believe in lies. You turned away from me, so alone in your distress that I no longer wanted to console you. I had never been able to anyway. Only he could soothe you. But why was I, even now, not enough? Did you imagine that I too would die without him?
When I tell someone about my refugee experience, a story I’ve told countless times, I’m always aware that I have no real memory of it. At some point it’ll feel as though I’m describing the plot poi…
Watch Vu Trans’s Lecture “Noir and Refugee Experience” at University of Chicago:
I am the dark and ominous tower
your greenless, infertile backyard
the unsightly vista that you view
each morning, from your high rise
curtainless, kitchenette windows.
– Marvin Tate, “A Bruised Mood Over the Cabrini Green Projects”
This crack
Runs up the wall, continues
Through the upstairs window,
Splits the sky.
It has divided the statue.
It is a ripple in water.
I try not to go on
But it cuts through my voice
And my words break
And settle, unevenly, on the page;
It is the margin of a poem.
Write what you know. While writers are told that every day, a writer’s work is naturally that much better if what they know is pretty cool stuff. In Scott Turow’s latest book, Personal Injuries, the best-selling legal thriller writer takes what he knows his personal experience as a prosecutor in a major judicial corruption probe […]
Watch Scott Turow discuss how his political views influence his work:
If you hear gunfire on a Thursday afternoon,
it could be for a wedding, or it could be for you.
Always enter a home with your right foot;
the left is for cemeteries and unclean places.
If a body is what you want
then here is bone and gristle and flesh.
Here is the clavicle-snapped wish,
the aorta’s opened valves, the leap
thought makes at the synaptic gap.
Audio recording of the Poetry Center Reading Series featuring Tom Raworth, Diane di Prima, Kimiko Hahn, Eugene Gloria, Patricia Smith, Luis Rodriguez, Robert Bly, Brian Turner, Bruce Weigl, Tyehimba Jess, A. Van Jordan, Arielle Greenberg, Billy Corgan, Franz Wright, Czeslaw Milosz, Louise Glück, and Alicia Ostriker.
It begins simply with a fist, white-knuckled
and tight, glossy with sweat. With two eyes
in a rearview mirror watching for a convoy.
The radio a soundtrack that adrenaline has
pushed into silence, replacing it with a heartbeat,
his thumb trembling over the button.
