May 15, 2025 First Person A Night and a Day and a Night and a Day and a Night and a Day in the Dark By Lisa Carver Photographs courtesy of Lisa Carver. Day One All around me are short, shiny young Romans groping each other. The old ones engage in the more solitary pleasures of hawking loogies and eating out of greasy paper bags. I’m on my way to a dark retreat on a farm so high up in the mountains it requires five modes of transportation to get there—plane, train, metro, bus, taxi—each more confusing than the last. You buy your bus ticket at a particular newsstand nowhere near the bus. The only reason I knew this was because Antonello, the dark-retreat guide, had emailed me travel instructions … paragraphs of them … which I had memorized for dear life. Clutching my ticket, I tried to go through gate ten up the stairs to platform ten, as instructed, but the gate was locked. I tried gate eleven, but there was a sign saying not to cross the platform, which would have been the only way to get to ten. Vomit or diarrhea had been flung over the wall of the stairwell at regular intervals the whole way up. How did anyone have so much stuff in their guts? And why would they keep going up the stairs? I would have laid down and called 911. These Italians are of hearty stock. The smell was amazing. The arrow indicating the way to the metro switched directions so many times it curled and pointed at the sky. I guess you just guess here. Don’t even think about asking for help from the people in little cages like tollbooths scattered about. Signs in front of the booths warn in English: “We’re Not Here to Give Information.” Read More
May 13, 2025 First Person There Is Another World, But It Is This One By Luke Allan Freeman Gage Delamotte, Illuminated Initial from Hymnal, 1830–1862. Courtesy of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Elisha Whittelsey Collection, The Elisha Whittelsey Fund, 1966. Public domain. 1. Before my mum died I was a rain guy. Weren’t we all? Now I get it: the wind. Its shoulders. Smooth and deep as a bowl. Like a lullaby about a big old brush. Glowing, of course, but on the inside, far away from our world. Who could possibly go through the death of their mother and come out the other side anything less than a total idiot for wind? It is the golden whistle. God’s first attempt at a dinosaur. A holiday from all that silence and color. 2. In her final text messages, sent the night before she died, my mum invites her friend over for sex, a reminder that two things can sometimes meet the same need. 3. The invitation to sex in the midst of death is my mum at her most desperate, so it’s also my mum as I most love her, miss her. Like the embroideries she made of my stepdad’s poems when he was dying of cancer, it weaves together death and love into something that can be shared, a made thing amid all the unmaking. 4. My mum always had a needlework going, though she called them her tapestries. Big old castles were a particular specialty. So were grumpy bowls of fruit. But what I remember most about her tapestries are the backs, that mess of colored thread that looks like a vomited version of the castle or sunset or pineapple on the front. When you live with a tapestry maker (tapestrist? tapestreur?) you get used to seeing this frayed mass of color, which they carry around with them at all times like a small shield. The hours my mum spent tapestrating appeared to be spent inspecting the reverse of a mysterious hairy object. Read More
May 12, 2025 Lectures John Ashbery’s Analyst By Hannah Zeavin John Ashbery, 1975. Photograph by Michael Teague, via Wikimedia Commons. Public domain. John Ashbery was analyzed by Carlos Carrillo. Jane Freilicher was analyzed by Edmund Bergler. Bernadette Mayer was in analysis with David Rubinfine. Kenneth Koch was analyzed by Rudolph Loewenstein. James Schuyler was hospitalized at Payne Whitney and Bloomingdale, where the day got slowly started. John Wieners was sent to Medfield and then sent us Asylum Poems. Was Barbara Guest analyzed? Someone told me she was, but I couldn’t prove it. Alice Notley told me she was in treatment for a bit after Ted Berrigan died. There is no information about Frank O’Hara being analyzed. No information about Amiri Baraka being analyzed, save for when Vivian Gornick imagined how it might go down, in the Village Voice. We have long known that psychoanalysts love poetry—though I think the jury is out on whether they, as a class, can be said particularly to love poets, whether as patients or otherwise. Elsewhere, psychoanalysis has been found guilty of plundering the poets: we see evidence in the field’s overreliance on Keats’s negative capability, and on Shakespearean drama as illustration of Oedipal conflict. The number of papers on poetry alone that I had to proof, across just a few years’ time as the managing editor of The Psychoanalytic Quarterly, offers us data on the import of poetry to psychoanalysis, and that’s without going to Freud, who basically owned up to the fact that the poets invented psychoanalysis. Read More
May 9, 2025 The Review’s Review The Hobo Handbook By Jeremiah David Between Bakersfield and Fresno, California. Photograph by Rondal Partridge, via Wikimedia Commons. Public domain. The name of the book is a ruse. Camping on Low or No Dollars, the dingy cover page reads. An older edition bears a similarly anodyne title: From Birmingham to Wendover. Both are a misdirection, intended to keep the wrong people—cops, journalists, nosy normies like me—from realizing what they’re holding. The Crew Change Guide is a set of best practices and guidelines for hopping freight trains anywhere in the U.S. and Canada. A “crew change” refers to a train’s personnel shift, a brief window of opportunity for those brave enough to take it. In the heist movie, this is that ten-second gap after the night watchman clocks out and before his replacement takes over. For a train hopper, it’s a rare chance to clamber up a wagon undetected. Read More
May 8, 2025 First Person The Last Dreams By Naguib Mahfouz All photographs by Diana Matar. Dream 203 I found myself in a strange and sad place when suddenly there was my old love, B. She walked burdened by old age. Knowing that I will never see her again, I felt such deep sorrow. Dream 204 I saw myself in my forties, caressing a pale rose. It responded, encouraging me, but, given our age difference, I hesitated. My reluctance persisted until she left, leaving me alone to contend with my aging self. Read More
May 6, 2025 First Person A Certain Kind of Romantic By Edward Hirsch Postcard from the Boston Public Library Tichnor Brothers Collection. Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons. PARALLEL PARKING The guidance counselor was my driver’s ed teacher. He liked to talk about football. He didn’t guide me much on driving. I angled the car into the school lot. We never practiced parallel parking. Therefore, I failed the test for my driver’s license twice. I had one more try. I diligently practiced between garbage cans in front of the house. It was like playing bumper tag. I didn’t know who got it worse—the fender or the cans. My dad and I drove to Des Plaines for my last try. I pulled into the street. The instructor had a headache and blew off the part about parking. I drove to the first McDonald’s on River Road to celebrate my special day. It was as spotless as all the others. But there were hundreds of green pickles dotting the lot. “I guess they don’t want you to park here,” my dad said. CAUTION Whenever I drove, my mother sat in the passenger seat and slammed on imaginary brakes at yellow traffic lights. This was cautionary. When I was on my own, I stopped. When I was with her, I gunned it. AFTER I GOT MY DRIVER’S LICENSE I picked up my grandmother at her poker game on Saturday night. She wanted to show me off to her friends. She was in high spirits after the win. When we got back to her place, she drank half a beer to mark the occasion. My grandmother didn’t want me to drink and drive. That was a laugh. I had never even had a full beer. I ate a pastry in celebration. Whenever I had a date, I dropped off my grandmother in front of her apartment on Lawrence Avenue. She said, “Good luck in all your future endeavors.” “Okay, Gram, but I’ll pick you up for breakfast in the morning.” Read More