NEW ENGLAND REVIEW-MIDDLEBURY SERIES最新文献

{"title":"It's Important I Remember That Abraham Lincoln Always Measured Before He Cut—, and: It's Important I Remember That Frederick Douglass Learned How to Read—","authors":"Cortney Lamar Charleston","doi":"10.1353/ner.2023.a908952","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/ner.2023.a908952","url":null,"abstract":"It's Important I Remember That Abraham Lincoln Always Measured Before He Cut—, and: It's Important I Remember That Frederick Douglass Learned How to Read— Cortney Lamar Charleston (bio) It's Important I Remember That Abraham Lincoln Always Measured Before He Cut— saying less, for now, about the steady hand holding the penof proclamation and presidential address, saying more of the one wrapped around the axe handle,that brought the head down straight and split the rails that built the fence which became the borderthat separated the \"civilized\" from those they labeled savage and created farmland from their land, that Abe labored onfor no payment except for his father's admonishment while living on the frontier of difficult feelings, eyes forever fullof mood and storm. Say more of the man of lithe stature who was too small in status to perjure himself before the public, of the candidatewho was common enough to be a trustworthy steward over the common interest as far as working men saw it. Say moreof the sense of duty and command he had, of his executive competence and sense of determination. See, I can indulge a good mythmade of a mortal man up until the point it makes myth of me as well: when my thanks are invited implicitly in every retelling of his storyfor a piece of paper that cut around electoral edges, that freed my forebears as battle tactic to spare a fiction grand enoughfor people to keep dying for in perpetuity. He would save the Union without freeing any slave if he could, the president wroteto Horace Greeley with hallmark honesty: without any slaves [End Page 135] it wouldn't have been possible to save it and without any slavesit wouldn't have needed saving, the war between states and their stated ideals made moot, so say more of the price paid to refortify the foundationof a house that is burning now because it didn't fall back then. Say more on prudence when insistence is the only righteous option. Say moreabout what happens when common men have a measure of control in their leathered hands: ink and parchment, blade and hilt. [End Page 136] It's Important I Remember That Frederick Douglass Learned How to Read— and Anna Murray Douglass, his first missus, did not. Before her husband left boyhood's single digits,his lessons in letters were swiftly ended by his new master—intervening in his own wife's illegality—with the recognitionan ability to read ruins a slave's fit for enslavement. As legend goes, this launched Frederick's pursuit of literacyand the liberation it would deliver, but this poem, for one thing,for once, is not about him in the first, though it must turn aroundhis decisions as Anna did whenever he disappeared, literally,into his work, a literary man and lecturer in demandrunning across borders like a sentence let off its chain. Whereas her husband had come to be seenas unfit for anything less than acclaim, Anna was seenas unfit for him by many in the academy of abolitionists,a woman so dark the marks of beauty couldn't be","PeriodicalId":41449,"journal":{"name":"NEW ENGLAND REVIEW-MIDDLEBURY SERIES","volume":"1 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"136206953","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Ashes, and: Summer Afternoon, and: Fables and Seas","authors":"Laura Newbern","doi":"10.1353/ner.2023.a908947","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/ner.2023.a908947","url":null,"abstract":"Ashes, and: Summer Afternoon, and: Fables and Seas Laura Newbern (bio) Ashes In the waiting roomI notice my doctor's a painter, his name scrawledin the corner of a canvas depictingtwo mountains, a country church, and a streaked sky. And the painting is not on a wallbut on an easel thrust out like a hipinto the room, at hip level; and on the TV overhead is a woman who wants to bea millionaire, trying to decidewhether the Heaven Above company is in the businessof placing a loved one's ashes inside a firework, or,inside a stuffed animal.C or B. She cannot decide. She cannot decide and the waitis interminable; she wants it to beB, stuffed animal; minutes and minutes go byas she twists herself, in her striped shirtand her denim jacket, into one answer and thenthe other, smiling, grimacing, smiling again; she wantsthat sweetness, maybe, even more than the money. This is my country. My doctorhas painted the sky over his church a daring, devotional redand I imagine my mother or maybe my beautiful red-headed sisterblazing across it: a starry final act. And by then, at last, the woman contestant has it—reluctantlyC, she says, final answer. To which the host,creating suspense, says, as slowly as possible, You were all over the place,but you thought it through.And you, my dear, yes. You came through. [End Page 80] Summer Afternoon Those are the words of the writer, the one who deemed themthe two most beautiful words in the Englishlanguage—summer and afternoon. But who of courseloved not the words, but what they conjured.For him, maybe, it was his man, with a tray, descendinga slope of lawn in a black suit; and he himselfin a simple chair, in the shade; but an upholsteredchair, an inside chair brought out, and the shadethe shade of a great sleeping tree. I read a novelin which a man who had done something terrible stoleaway, in a boat no one had noticed, having descendeda cliff, away from a great house and all the way downto a river, all the way down to an also unnoticed dockwhere the boat floated, in wait. And dark cloudsraced down the river—not the word dark, northe word clouds, but the fact of the secret boat nowin the open; the man crouched inside it, escaping; the currentample, the ancient trees on either bank forminga hallway of sunset, laced with smoke: dark clouds, dark clouds. [End Page 81] Fables and Seas Once, my father sent me a wondrous letter.About a night when my parents were trulyyoung; when he and my mother, traveling together in Europe, drove into Luxembourg and knewthey needed, without reservations, a placeto stop for the night. We had you with us, he wrote, and at the latehour, at the inn with its lastroom, the owners worried over the baby— baby crying all night, in the blue bath-light of Luxembourg, your parentsyoung as they were. So we wrapped you up, tight, my father wrote, bentover whatever crib was provided, overthe glass globe now in a letter composed, and sent: the little red carparked outside …You did not make a sound, he wrote, fr","PeriodicalId":41449,"journal":{"name":"NEW ENGLAND REVIEW-MIDDLEBURY SERIES","volume":"77 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"136207200","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Editor's Note","authors":"","doi":"10.1353/ner.2023.a908937","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/ner.2023.a908937","url":null,"abstract":"Editor's Note Carolyn Kuebler It's been a summer of flooding close to home and of fires and droughts elsewhere—but also a summer of forgetting all that, of mowing the wet grass, picking tomatoes, and walking back and forth over the same streets, even when portions of them have been temporarily closed due to flood damage. Two essays I've read lately about literature, the lyric, and imaginative writing have been following me around during this time, in part because I think they have something to do with the New England Review, which is a project of literature and imagination and is also a project of now, of our present age and its difficulties, of which the floods and fires are just the beginning. One is \"A Poem Is a Walk\" by A. R. Ammons, first published in the literary magazine Epoch in 1968, a year of severe disruption and violence, and the other Min Hyoung Song's introduction to his book Climate Lyricism, published in 2022 by Duke University Press. They may seem to stand in opposition to each other, especially in ascribing any usefulness to literature, but both, to me, articulate something about how to think and act in small, individual-scale ways in the face of the terrifyingly large forces that are beyond our power of comprehension. Song focuses on the \"colossus\" of climate change, which has been on my mind both too much and too little, and Ammons refers to the \"large, vague, unlimited, unknown,\" which could describe climate change but could also describe god or death or what Annie Dillard calls the Absolute. Both of these essays have something to say about how a poem—or imagination, or the lyric—can encompass both the tangible and intangible at once. And to me they suggest that attentiveness to the small and immediate can offer crucial, even life-saving, access to that which eludes rational thinking and the reach of any single individual's actions or powers of description. \"For though we often need to be restored to the small, concrete, limited, and certain, we as often need to be reminded of the large, vague, unlimited, unknown,\" Ammons says. And Song writes that literary works, especially those written by writers who are \"minor\" in some way, \"demand attunement to the everyday in original, and often-estranging, ways that made me … more aware of the extraordinary that is all around me.\" Often the writing we publish in the New England Review is difficult, requires energy and attention, and is not immediately graspable. But there's a chance that this writing, which is sometimes \"estranging\" and slips past rational thinking, [End Page 6] might activate a new kind of attentiveness to the ordinary. And in turn this activation might make it more possible for readers to locate themselves within something larger rather than simply feeling powerless in the face of it, or even numb to it entirely. Among other things, it might allow a reader to imagine a bridge between what humans can know and explain and act upon and that which is beyond us. In the pa","PeriodicalId":41449,"journal":{"name":"NEW ENGLAND REVIEW-MIDDLEBURY SERIES","volume":"36 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"136206937","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"The Field Which Had Been a Meadow Once, and: Epicurus","authors":"John James","doi":"10.1353/ner.2023.a908938","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/ner.2023.a908938","url":null,"abstract":"The Field Which Had Been a Meadow Once, and: Epicurus John James (bio) The Field Which Had Been a Meadow Once Gently the cherryblossoms shake they shake. The limbsbend this way &the flowers do not return.They revolutein ion air. It lifts itlifts. The dirt is callous now.Desiccated sothat when I lookout over the plainwhat registers is a palimpsestof dried foliage, phantomicstumps of withered oaksemerging likesheared corn from the furrows& the flat, uneven ashwhere grapevines used to be.Often I am permitted.The oak trees lose their form.Often I am permittedto project this image.Barn swallows swirl. Theylift they—Lifeexpands, absorbs. It tendsin directionsalmost infinite. (In sunkgutters of abandoned houses,in breaks between concrete squares.)Often I return tothis field which had beena meadow once, whichlike a mine in the mindrases the eternal pastureI still call home. My body [End Page 8] ages now. The grassblows east toward the sourceof the sun. In ion air it lifts. It isno dream. Still the saplingsusher from the uneven earth.Still the worm turns.The wind still moves in concertwith the few shaking leaves, which stillphotosynthesize in thisunmoving afternoon. [End Page 9] Epicurus died of kidney stonesafter an illness of fourteen days.According to Hermippushe climbed into a bronze bath,requested wine, and \"tossed it back.\"He soaked his legs and, sated,watched soap amass in beady rivuletsacross his limbs and hardened chest,traced on his thigh an arrow-shaped scar which, in the narrow light,called to mind Ulysses. Nothingcomes into being from what is not.The totality of things has always beenjust as it is now. His kidney swelledto the size of a balloon. Body and void,widening void. This was a good death.Sudden fissure in the wire of the systemof filtration. Rupture in the soul'smachine. A perfect, terrifying simulacrumof another ordinary wound. [End Page 10] John James John James is the author of The Milk Hours (Milkweed, 2019), selected by Henri Cole for the Max Ritvo Poetry Prize, as well as two chapbooks, most recently Winter, Glossolalia (Black Spring, 2022). His poems appear in Boston Review, Kenyon Review, Gulf Coast, PEN Poetry Series, Best American Poetry, and elsewhere. His work has been supported by the Bread Loaf Environmental Writers' Conference, the Academy of American Poets, and the Lannan Center for Poetics and Social Practice at Georgetown University. He holds an MFA from Columbia and is completing a PhD in English at the University of California, Berkeley. Copyright © 2023 Middlebury College","PeriodicalId":41449,"journal":{"name":"NEW ENGLAND REVIEW-MIDDLEBURY SERIES","volume":"15 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"136208237","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Adjustment of Status","authors":"Samuel Kolawole","doi":"10.1353/ner.2023.a908958","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/ner.2023.a908958","url":null,"abstract":"Adjustment of Status Samuel Kolawole (bio) Folahan slouched on the shady bench of the roadside paraga bar five minutes away from the apartment he shared with a bus driver who was never home. He checked his pocket for his phone after hearing a ping and discovered that it was from his wife. He sighed and put it back without even glancing at her message. He was exhausted from walking in the scorching sun and needed to get his mind off his problems. Mama Nkechi, the owner, poured him a plastic cup without asking. He took the cup with a smile and drank as he watched vehicles and passersby. His head filled with warmth. His eyes watered. Alerted by another ding, he dug into his pocket for his phone and saw that message from his wife again, and again he returned it to his pocket unread. A wispy fellow waved as he walked past the canopied bench and called out to him: \"Londoner!\" Folahan had never been to London. He could not quite recall when he acquired that nickname—it must have been during one of his drunken roadside rants about America. He must have informed his drinking companions in his gonna-wanna accent that in his two years of living in America, he had never experienced a power outage. He must have told them about Tyler Perry Studios, Coca-Cola, and the place where Martin Luther King Jr. once lived. He must have told them about massage parlors where \"anything goes\"—nondescript buildings in neighborhood strip malls—and even sounded a little emotional about it. He must have tried to explain who Martin Luther King Jr. was, even though one or two of them must have wanted to tell him they already knew. He must have peppered his speeches with fuck and shit. One of them probably called him a Londoner as an insult: \"Because you are a Londoner, you think you are better than us, abi?\" Maybe the person who first called him Londoner didn't care where he'd traveled as long as it was overseas. The nickname apparently stuck, but Folahan didn't care what they called him as long as he didn't have to offer his real name. Yes, he frequented the joint and had conversations with them over shots of cheap, locally brewed rum, till the church bells nearby rang for the umpteenth time, but that didn't mean he should tell his business to strangers. Folahan was well aware that they regarded him as a \"been-to,\" someone who had traveled abroad and was now living large at home. Only he had been back in Nigeria for three months without informing his wife [End Page 172] or children. Only he had lost his dignity and returned home almost penniless. Folahan waved back at the fellow and wiped the sweat from his brow. He was sober now. Not for long. Earlier that day, he had heard about the explosion in Lagos but was too preoccupied to care. He had seen an okada man shuffle over to a young girl sitting in a kiosk with a transistor radio pressed close to her ear. The fellow had pinched her cheeks playfully, and while the girl with a serious-looking face tried to fend him off, the annou","PeriodicalId":41449,"journal":{"name":"NEW ENGLAND REVIEW-MIDDLEBURY SERIES","volume":"1 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"136206954","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"From Stories: South Sudan","authors":"Adrie Kusserow","doi":"10.1353/ner.2023.a908950","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/ner.2023.a908950","url":null,"abstract":"From Stories:South Sudan Adrie Kusserow (bio) mating knot Yei, South Sudan Between wars, when it's safe and the Lord's Resistance Army isn't on another child-kidnapping tour, our whole family stays out in the bush while the girls' school is built. Along with the students from the college where we teach, we sleep in battered tents, shooing chickens away. Between the mangos falling on our tent, the diesel generator belching on and off, the diving bats, and the eerie drums marking the death of a toddler, we can't sleep. So I dig into my purse of endless pharmaceuticals, find a soggy Benadryl to put an end to this God-awful day. Hours later, still awake, adrenaline waging war against Benadryl, I sneak off in the hopes of plugging my laptop into the generator outlet. The competition is steep. Students watch their laptop batteries obsessively, competing for the best spot near the generator in the early morning queue. Even in the dim moonlight, you can't miss it, a vast T-shaped vein of electric current, mauled by the charging cords of NGO laptops and iPhones, a tangled nest of dozens of lines wrapped around each other. I can barely look at it, so like the writhing pile of snakes we see near the river in a mating knot, the one female with her head barely rising from the suffocating mass. When I worm my fingers deep into the pile of electrical cables, I risk pushing other out, but amidst the hot heap I find one spot open and push my cord deep into the socket, hoping it won't overload. I feel sick, taking so much from this stick-thin, anemic country that keeps getting pummeled with war. Still, plugged in I feel safe, backed up, and know I'll finally sleep. When I get back to the tent, there is my daughter, child of perpetual worry and wakefulness, limp and finally asleep, her fingers white-knuckle gripped around her iPhone, her headphones on her pillow, the tiny sounds of Harry Potter skittering like mice into the vast Sudanese bush. [End Page 104] the fat claw of my heart Sudanese refugee camp, northwest Uganda Part African bush, part Wild West, Arua, where we're based, is a grungy, dusty, frontier town. Giant diesel trucks barrel through, with obese sacks of grain lying like walrus inside. I chase Willem from malarial puddle to puddle, my white blouse frilled like a gaudy gladiola, my lavish concern for my chubby son suddenly rococo, absurd. Our drivers gun insanely over the dusty red roads, lurching from pothole to pothole, in a caravan of slick, shiny white vans, tattooed with symbols of western aid. Willem on my lap, trying to nurse between bumps, my hands a helmet to his bobbing skull. A three-legged goat hobbles to the side, and though we imagine we are a huge interruption, women balancing jerrycans on their heads face our wake of dust and rage as they would any other gust of wind—water, sun, NGO. We arrive covered in orange dust, coughing, our fleet of SUVs parked under the trees, engines cooling, alarms beeping and squawking as we lock up the veh","PeriodicalId":41449,"journal":{"name":"NEW ENGLAND REVIEW-MIDDLEBURY SERIES","volume":"68 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"136207813","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Sister Fat","authors":"Jessie Ren Marshall","doi":"10.1353/ner.2023.a908956","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/ner.2023.a908956","url":null,"abstract":"Sister Fat Jessie Ren Marshall (bio) He told me he was famous. I had never heard the word in English. \"Fey. Mess,\" he said. \"A. Moose,\" I replied. The boy scratched his sandy beard and searched for a synonym in his limited Tokyo-ben. \"Chomei. Yūmei. Yubi—ah, ah—Yubikitasu?\" \"Oh,\" I said. \"You are ubiquitous! I am ubiquitous, too.\" The boy laughed and switched back to his native English. \"C'mon. If you've never left the island, you can't be famous.\" Well, this was a stupid thing to say. Fuji-san never leaves Honshu, yet Mount Fuji is known worldwide! \"A fool's mouth is wasted in speech,\" I said, and pointed to a distant tree shrouded with mist. \"Now let's suck face in the root cave.\" We walked to the island's eastern edge, where the waves spat mist and the rocks moaned. I squatted, grabbing a limb of heavy pine, and telling the boy to follow. He looked down at the wet cliffs with a longing I'd seen once before. To disrupt his depression I asked, \"In America, am I on TV a lot?\" \"You?\" He shook his head three times: No, no, no. \"You have to be filmed before you can appear on television.\" Then in Japanese, he added, \"Stupid cow.\" \"Eat shit,\" I said. \"You don't know a thing about a thing.\" The boy assumed he was my first American, but no. A wrinkled doctor who smelled like the pith of an orange had taken pictures of me. I performed several different poses. He promised to put them on Hollywood TV. Surely the yellow-haired boy had seen them by now? I jammed my fingers between two rocks and followed the crack to the mouth of a cave. The yellow-haired boy came down quick and easy as a waterfall. When he reached the ledge, I pulled him inside. \"Neat,\" he said, touching a slimy root above our heads. \"Do you think it will fall?\" I offered to lie down if it would make him feel better. \"Distribute the weight,\" I said, rolling onto my back. My bottom enveloped the loose stones and my dress snuck above my knees. \"Like an elevator,\" he said, snuggling next to me. \"When it drops.\" His breath was powerful. Minty. Callused fingers explored my belly rolls. When his hand got to my breasts he whistled through his teeth. Nipples the size [End Page 155] of starfish, that's what Mother says. An ass to rival the moon. The boy squeezed my shoulder and ground against my thigh. \"It's like you're all tits,\" he said. \"Tits, tits, tits.\" The blond boy did not taste like custard as I'd hoped, but he had an oatmeal color to his privates that I found pleasing. His nose cast a profound shadow, but then, that is the American way of doing noses. If I looked at it from the correct angle, I could convince myself this would be an okay nose for my unborn child. The boy climbed on top and rubbed until his bamboo became a jellyfish. I made sure to scoop up all the goodies and stuff them inside my own dark cave. After this transaction was complete, he slid to my side and patted my shoulder fondly, as if it were a well-behaved dog. \"I know we just met,\" he said, \"but I think I want you to kil","PeriodicalId":41449,"journal":{"name":"NEW ENGLAND REVIEW-MIDDLEBURY SERIES","volume":"53 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"136207997","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Some Lines Written in Clare Priory Yard","authors":"G. C. Waldrep","doi":"10.1353/ner.2023.a908942","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/ner.2023.a908942","url":null,"abstract":"Some Lines Written in Clare Priory Yard G. C. Waldrep (bio) I hurt myself into imagining. The flies, the priory flies,settle over the length of my body, the blue of my shirt,my vest. At one time I wanted music so badly I carved itinto the back of my left hand—the staff at least.This was, notionally, to serve as a reminder. To carveanything into the flesh, with any implement—the surgeonsdo it, we (who survive) applaud. We (who are artists)suspended. In the light of the priory yard, the fruitsof that labor, no longer visible (as they were, earlier,under the awning of the pub). The flies avoid my skin,prefer my shirt, its wavelength. All changed,in the twinkling of an eye, but the wounds go with us.Perhaps that is what attracts the flies, which do not askanything of me, save surface. Surface, the surfaceof music, a guardian. It holds its crooked finger to its lips.Sounds made by flies, spring warblers, rooks, the threegardeners (two women, one man, all elderly) bearing& then bearing away. Look, now I'm down on my hands& knees, says one. But I am surfeited with looking.I close my eyes. Such a great brightness reaches us.In the walled courtyard of the priory, I am a stranger,but—a permitted stranger. In the absence left by music,the world multiplies. In its presence also. I am,in these moments, at the center of the world worlding.Each fly, each jackdaw, each devotee, at the center:a simultaneity of centers. Music threads us like a needle.My garment sewn from scraps the dead pass through.I don't mind, I am at rest among absolutes. To share,to apportion: the great sum. Music in its measure. I leanforward, I squint: Christ is still there. He measuresthe distance, or—He is the distance, measured. It's true,I thought I could sing my way to Him. Now I pressthe back of my left hand to my dry lips. Some of thiswas long ago; some of this is now. I spread my dreams [End Page 35] out on the priory lawn to dry. There is a certain peacein being a guest among guests. The world, worlding,falls away—a bit, to a respectful distance. Then I hearthe siren of the ambulance rushing as if towardsme, towards where I am, but veering off, somewhereto the north. My friend says we are almost donewith these expressions of faith. It does not grieve him.We must start over, he says. With what, I ask.With small, informal associations grounded in friendship,he replies. Friend hand. Friend breath. Friend rook.Friend pain. The world cries Welcome welcome welcomewelcome! It is wildly indiscriminate. One gardener,two pass me with their wheelbarrows. Don't mind me,I want to say. They don't mind me. This is my belonging-place. The blue of my shirt, the same blue as this lateApril sky—perhaps this is what confounds the flies.Friend fly, spinning your decimals. In season of patronage.Tithe of the material, stored in the soul's broad barn.I replenish my testimony. The Christ of here,vs. the Christ of there (there, in the visible distance,beckoning, unbeckoning). This song is a measurementI wa","PeriodicalId":41449,"journal":{"name":"NEW ENGLAND REVIEW-MIDDLEBURY SERIES","volume":"25 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"136206961","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"An American Girl at Napoleon's Tomb","authors":"Adeline Trafton","doi":"10.1353/ner.2023.a908960","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/ner.2023.a908960","url":null,"abstract":"An American Girl at Napoleon's Tomb Adeline Trafton [End Page 185] There is nothing more wonderful in Paris than the tomb prepared to receive the remains of the first Napoleon, in the chapel of the Hôtel des Invalides; fitting, it would seem to be, that he should rest here among his old soldiers. We left the carriage at the gateway, and crossed the open court, mounted the wide steps, followed the half dozen other parties through the open doors, and this was what we saw. At the farther end of the great chapel or church, an altar, approached by wide, marble steps; gilt and candles embellished it, and a large, gilt cross upon it bore an image of the crucified Lord. All this was not unlike what we had seen many times. But four immense twisted columns rose from its four corners—columns of Egyptian marble, writhing like spotted serpents. They supported a canopy of gold, and the play of lights upon this, through the stained windows above and on either side, was indescribable. As we entered the door, darkness enveloped it, save where an invisible sun seemed to touch the roof of gold and rest lightly upon the pillars; an invisible sun, indeed, for, without, the sky was heavy with clouds. As we advanced, this unearthly light touched new points—the gilded candlesticks, the dying Saviour, but above all the writhings of these monster serpents, until the whole seemed a thing of life, a something which grew and expanded every moment, and was almost fearful to look upon. Filling the centre of the chapel was a circular marble wall breast-high. Do you remember, in going to the old Senate chamber at Washington, after passing through the rotunda, the great marble well-curb down which you could look into the room below? This was like that, only more vast. Over it leaned a hundred people, at least, gazing down upon what? A circular, roofless room, a crypt to hold a tomb; each pillar around its circumference was the colossal figure of a woman; between these hung the tattered tri-colors borne in many a fierce conflict, beneath the burning suns of Egypt and over the dreary snows of Russia, with seventy colors captured from the enemies of France. A wreath of laurel in the mosaic floor surrounded the names Austerlitz, Marengo, Friedland, Jena, Wagram, Moscow, and Pyramids, and in the centre rose the sarcophagus of Finland granite, prepared to hold the body of him whose ambition knew no bounds. The letter N upon one polished side was the only inscription it bore. He who wrote his name in blood needed no epitaph. The entrance to this crypt is through bronze doors, behind the altar, and [End Page 186] gained by passing under it. On either side stood a colossal figure in bronze; kings they seemed to be, giant kings, in long black robes and with crowns of black upon their heads. One held, upon the black cushion in his hands, a crown of gold and a golden sword; the other, a globe crowned with a cross and a golden sceptre. They were so grand, and dark, and still, they gazed upon ","PeriodicalId":41449,"journal":{"name":"NEW ENGLAND REVIEW-MIDDLEBURY SERIES","volume":"2018 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"136207986","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Just Another Family","authors":"Lori Ostlund","doi":"10.1353/ner.2023.a908945","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/ner.2023.a908945","url":null,"abstract":"Just Another Family Lori Ostlund (bio) My father spent the last year of his life discontinent. He'd always had trouble with prefixes. The day after he died, I entered my parents' house—the house I grew up in—to the smell of piss, the humid night air thick with it. \"It's the mattress,\" my mother explained, and I said, well, then the mattress had to go. I tried to haul it out right then, just dropped my bag and went down the hallway to their bedroom. I started with the soda bottles. There were five of them, scattered beneath their bed, three with urine still sloshing around inside from when my father had relieved himself during the night. I used a broom to maneuver them out while my mother watched, lying on the floor on the far side of the bed, peering at me across its underbelly and demanding that I call them pop bottles. She was sure that I was saying soda to bother her because she said there was no way a person could grow up saying pop and then find herself one day just thinking soda. As I knelt beside their bed, I felt something hard beneath my right knee. \"Why are there cough drops all over the carpet?\" I asked, using the plural, for I could see then that the floor was dotted with them, half-sucked and smooth like sea glass washed up in the dingy blue shag of my parents' bedroom. \"Your father coughs a lot at night. He sucks on them until he's just about to doze off, and then he'd spit them on the floor,\" my mother explained, her sentence beginning in the present tense but ending in the past, because that's the way death worked, the fact of it lost for whole seconds, whole sentences. \"I used to pick them up in the morning, but he'd get after me for wasting perfectly good cough drops.\" \"Bettina's not here yet?\" I asked. My sister lived just an hour away, so I was annoyed that she had not arrived, but I was also admitting defeat: the mattress was too much for me to handle alone. \"You know she has a family,\" my mother said, by way of excusing her absence. Rachel and I had been together eight years. We had a house, jobs, two cats, and a dog, so I thought of myself as having a family, also. \"You know what I mean, Sybil,\" my mother replied. I did know. She meant that I didn't have children, but mainly she meant that two women together was not a family. \"Well, if she's not here in the morning, I'll call a neighbor to help,\" I said, but [End Page 48] my mother did not like this plan. She felt a mattress soaked with urine was a family affair. My father was dead, I said, so what did it matter, and she said, \"Why can't you say 'passed away' like everyone else?\" This was a good question. From where she lay on the floor on the far side of the bed, she announced that she was putting me in my old bedroom. \"So you'll be comfortable,\" she added, and I did not say that I had never been comfortable in this room and could not imagine I'd start being comfortable in this room now, nor did I remind her that Rachel would be arriving the next day, which meant that I wo","PeriodicalId":41449,"journal":{"name":"NEW ENGLAND REVIEW-MIDDLEBURY SERIES","volume":"139 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"136207609","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}