Magnificent Octopus

Here's a great octopus of a poem I discovered this week: Takotsubo Cardiomyopathy I’m reviewing a left ventriculography from a man w...

As the old Narcons put it: "There is not space in the universe to tell the universe to the universe. Therein lies the peculiar beauty a...

"Haven't you ever noticed, Mr. Glebsky, how much more interesting the unknown is than the known? The unknown makes us think — it ma...

There are thoughts of freedom and imminent escape. I could throw away almost everything, she thinks, and begin all over again. Station Eleve...

It's a rainy day in Montreal and I'm glad to be reading this. This book is L.A., and here's a bit of noir amid the chaos. Özgür...

Her parents were too middle-aged and dull to suffer accidents or die before their time, like mountaineers or poets. For some reason I was un...

"Making logical assumptions and coming to a conclusion will not help you get your memory back. No, I just want to stimulate your brain....

"I know it's temporary." But this is her secret: she doesn't want it to end. What she can never tell Pablo, because he dis...

My mother's a news junkie. It started a few years after my father died. About the time we moved into our new house; we got cable and CNN...

I was waiting at the bus stop, for the bus, when it started to rain, not a downpour but it had more vehemence than a drizzle. It didn't...

Multiple Choice , by Alejandro Zambra, is fiction, nonfiction, poetry, something more, and something else entirely. It consists of 90 though...

In Vancouver a little while ago we peeked in on the exhibit Becoming Animal/Becoming Landscape at the Morris and Helen Belkin Art Gallery a...

For this exercise, mark the answer that puts the sentences in the best possible order to form a coherent text. I am reading Multiple Choi...

I understood only later that I can be quietly unhappy, because I'm incapable of violent reactions, I fear them, I prefer to be still, cu...

Train travel is an exercise in suspension, of both time and space; the days blur, we are carried suspended across the land, just above it. A...

We said nothing concrete, I still have those letters [...]. We focused, let's say, on a book he had read, on an article of interest for ...

For a cross-country train journey, people bring a lot of books. But I saw more people carrying them than actually reading them. It's too...

It was like crossing a border. I remember a dense crowd and a sort of humiliating difference. I looked not at the boys but at the girls, the...

As he reads, his eyes graze each poem's lines like a needle over an LP's grooves, atomizing them into letters, reassembling them int...

On December 31st of 1958 Lila had her first episode of dissolving margins. The term isn't mine, she always used it. She said that on tho...