Fifty-One HARVARD REVIEW
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number fifty-one HARVARD REVIEW published by HOUGHTON LIBRARY harvard university HARVARD REVIEW publisher: Tom Hyry, Florence Fearrington Librarian of Houghton Library publisher emeritus: Michael Shinagel founding editor: Stratis Haviaras editor: Christina Thompson poetry editor: Major Jackson fiction editor: Suzanne Berne managing editor: Chloe Garcia Roberts digital editor: Laura Healy design: Alex Camlin senior readers: M. R. Branwen • Deborah Pursch editorial assistants: Christopher Alessandrini • Silvia Golumbeanu • Virginia Marshall • Hannah Rosefield • Cecilia Weddell interns: Julia DeBenedictis • Hanna Kim • Camille Schmidt • Rachel Silverstein readers: Michelle Ceruli Adams • Parker Beak • Bo Young Choi • Tess Cushing • Ezra Feldman • Ophelia John • Sabrina Li • Jennifer Nickerson • Justin Reed • Lia Oppedisano • Sebastian Sarti • Micah Trippe • Anna Zink • Catherine Zuo contributing editors: Mary Jo Bang • Karen Bender • Michael Collier • Robert Coover • Lydia Davis • Denise Duhamel • David Ferry • Stephen Greenblatt • Alice Hoffman • Miranda July • Ilya Kaminsky • Yusef Komunyakaa • Campbell McGrath • Heather McHugh • Paul Muldoon • Les Murray • Dennis O’Driscoll • Carl Phillips • Stanley Plumly • Theresa Rebeck • Donald Revell • Peter Sacks • Robert Antony Siegel • Robert Scanlan • Charles Simic • Cole Swensen • Chase Twichell • Katherine Vaz • Kevin Young harvard review (issn 1077-2901) is published twice a year by Houghton Library domestic subscriptions: individuals: $20 (one year); $50 (three years); $80 (five years) institutions: $30 (one year) overseas subscriptions: individuals: $32 (one year) institutions: $40 (one year) enquiries: Harvard Review, Lamont Library, Harvard University, Cambridge, MA 02138 phone: (617) 495-9775 fax: (617) 496-3692 email: [email protected] online at harvardreview.org paper submissions should be accompanied by sase. online submissions should be submitted at harvardreview.submittable.com. books sent for review become the property of Harvard University Library. harvard review is indexed in ABELL, Humanities International Complete, Literature Online, and MLA. Full text available online through JSTOR. copyright © 2017 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College Printed in Canada by the Prolific Group and distributed by Ingram Periodicals. Contents christina thompson Editorial 8 stories moira mccavana No Spanish 10 gabriel brownstein No Time Like the Present 102 scott nadelson A Hole in Everything 191 richard carson Assisted Living 220 essays Joan wickersham Never Mind 48 hannah rosefield Birdsickness 69 ben miller The Secret of Jefferson Market Garden 94 eileen pollack Righteous Gentile 137 stuart gelzer Immigrants 154 sherry simpson Lucky You 182 poetry cecily parks Texas Natives 32 federico garcía lorca trans. sarah arvio The Guitar 34 Landscape 35 tracy k. smith Hill Country 36 sylvia legris Epigaeus: growing close upon the earth 44 Terminalis: proceeding from the end 45 John minczeski In Our End Is Our Beginning 46 william wenthe An Exhibit of Audubon’s Paintings 78 carl dennis At Emily Dickinson’s House 80 garret keizer First African 82 fady Joudah 38, 7, 31, 4 85 david gewanter from The Ego Anthology 92 from The Ego Anthology 93 laura mccullough Composition of Body : : Water Glass 120 eric pankey Small Works 122 bruce snider Litany for My Father’s Sperm 126 Elegy for the Girl I Was 128 christopher buckley Science & Eschatology 134 terrance hayes American Sonnet for My Past and Future Assassin 178 American Sonnet for My Past and Future Assassin 179 American Sonnet for My Past and Future Assassin 180 American Sonnet for My Past and Future Assassin 181 Jody gladding all suspect 212 art mags harries Acqua Alta 38 Water Rising 39 Rising Water 40 Deflated Earth 42 At a Pinch 43 hernan ardila Untitled, 2014 86 Untitled, 2014 87 Untitled, 2014 88 Untitled, 2012 89 Untitled, 2016 90 Untitled, 2013 91 Untitled, 2013 91 vincent hawkins Untitled 129 Untitled Plastic 129 Press 130 Orange Tip 131 Early Listener 131 Studio Installation 132 david mcdonald Self Portrait (Visible Self) 148 Self Portrait (Protected Self) 149 Casting Amongst the Sands #20 150 Casting Amongst the Sands #22 151 Casting Amongst the Sands #51 152 Falls 153 krista svalbonas Migrator 1 173 Migrants 56 174 Migrants 59 174 Migrants 57 175 Migrator 6 176 Migrator 8 177 anne lilly Eleven Miles Above Virgin 214 Anemone 215 Chiasmus 216 To Wreathe 217 Van Ruisdael’s View of Haarlem 218 Van Ruisdael’s View of Haarlem (detail) 219 contributors 241 Editorial Organizations like Harvard Review are meant to have mission state- ments, but somehow I’ve never quite gotten around to writing one. So, a few weeks ago, I signed up for a CLMP (Community of Literary Mag- azines and Publishers) webinar on crafting such a text—an experience that quickly reminded me why I’d put it off for so long. A mission statement is difficult because it’s inherently reductive. One suggestion, for example, was that we try to come up with a set of adjectives that describe the kind of writing we like and that we choose to publish. Okay, I thought. I can do that. How about smart, for starters? I have always liked writing that is clever, but, of course, there are different kinds of clever. Joan Wickersham’s essay in this issue about memoirists who recant is particularly clever in the conception, that is, it’s just a great idea. But there are other writers who are clever at the level of the sentence, clever in the use of words: Ben Miller’s essay on marriage, for example (“What attributes of our loving had waltzed us in the direction of longevity?”), or the virtuosic poet Sylvia Legris (“ Chastise the botan- ically criminal Manchurian elms”). Then, again, you don’t want everything to be sophisticated. Some- times the virtue of a piece is that it’s simple, both in the language and in the presentation of the world. I’ve always had a soft spot for directness, exhibited here in a story by Richard Carson, whose quiet, rather sad tale about caring for a cantakerous and decrepit father seems to speak a kind of bare-bones truth. But then there is also writing that is forceful and au- thoritative, like the work of Tracy K. Smith, who in a poem called “Hill Country” channels the voice of none other than God. Another bravura performance in this issue, this time by someone who is astonishingly young, is the story “No Spanish” by Moira McCavana, a recent Harvard 8 graduate who writes about language and family and faraway places with the grace and confidence of someone twice her age. And then what about funny? It’s hard to find funny writing, but in this issue we have several funny pieces, including one about being Jewish in Poland by Eileen Pollack (not inherently a funny subject, but funny in her hands), and another, a charming piece by Stuart Gelzer, about a Georgian immigrant named Zaza who turns up unexpected- ly—and inconveniently—at the narrator’s door. Then there is also witty, which is like a cooler, drier kind of funny, or like a cross between funny and smart. This is the category into which I’d put Hannah Rosefield’s essay about being a stranger not so much in a strange land as in a land inhabited by strange birds. Another witty piece of writing which is also quietly subversive is Cecily Parks’s “Texas Natives,” a poem made entirely from Mexican, Spanish, and Native American names of plants. We always want to be publishing work that is ambitious, including some that is occasionally opaque. And what about suspenseful? Unex- pected? Engaging? Elegant? Erudite? What set of adjectives will ever do, when the task of editing is actually to recognize all the different ways in which writing can be great? But, wait, maybe that’s it, maybe that’s our mission— though I’m not sure our webinar leader would agree. r Before I sign off on this issue, I want to add one final note. In 2018 a member of the staff of Houghton Library will be retiring, someone who has been not only an administrative savior from my first day on the job (I will never forget his kindness to me in those early, rather awkward weeks), but a tireless champion and loyal subscriber of Harvard Review. That person is Dennis Marnon, and I want to say publicly that we could not have done it without him and thank him with all my heart. —Christina Thompson 9 moira mccavana No Spanish When I was twelve, when we still lived in that small, moldering farmhouse in the hills behind Guernica, my father outlawed Spanish from our household. Like a dictator, he stood at the head of our fam- ily table and yelled, “No Spanish, NO SPANISH!” waving his arms as though he were helming his own national uprising. “We will all forget about that language, is that clear?” These demands, of course, he had delivered in Spanish, though not one of us had rushed to correct him. It was evidence that he, like us, spoke nothing else. To abandon Spanish would be to abandon the language in which all of our well-intentioned but still tenuous rela- tionships had been built. It was like removing our field of gravity, our established mode of relating to each other. Without Spanish, it seemed entirely possible that one of us might spin out into space. How were we supposed to tell each other practical things? Keep out of that corner; I’ve just spilled water and it’s slippery. Hold the door; I have too many things in my arms. Please, just leave me alone. Please, don’t even touch me. It’s obvious to me now that for my father, this impulsive vow to speak only in Basque functioned as a sort of double agent: a radical act 10 moira mccavana of political defiance masquerading as farce. When his lips split in a wily smile and his eyes flickered, I felt as though he were signing us up for a ridiculous play.