I said she didn’t have slender ankles, and she really took offense.
Three washings and still under my fingernails the smell of September.
It was fun. It continued to be fun. Then it was not fun at all.

In this interview, MFA nonfiction candidate Veronika Kelemen speaks with writer and Columbia professor Meghan Daum. Daum is the author of two collections of essays, My Misspent Youth and The Unspeakable: And Other Subjects of Discussion; a memoir, Life Would Be Perfect If I Lived In That House; and the novel The Quality of Life Report, and also edited the anthology Selfish, Shallow & Self-Absorbed: Sixteen Writers On The Decision Not To Have Kids. She is a 2015 Guggenheim Fellow and the recipient of the 2016 National Endowment for the Arts fellowship in creative writing.

These three stories by legendary writer Ryūnosuke Akutagawa were translated from the original Japanese by Ryan C.K. Choi.

Peruvian born poet and linguistics professor Mario Montalbetti’s latest collection of poetry Language Is a Revolver for Two showcases his incredible ability to use poetry to rhythmically unfold a prophecy to his reader. Throughout these fourteen poems, Montalbetti consistently uses the motif of movement, particularly its risings and fallings, as a way of tracking his exploration of language’s, and by extension, the world’s economy of supply and demand. Essentially delineating the reason that law cannot be fully applied to love: “one thing and only one thing affects love: / the demand for love. / … supply doesn’t affect love.”

If a book is as strong as its strongest character, Kathryn Harrison’s On Sunset has the advantage of many to choose from: the grandmother— a British Jewish heiress of Baghdadi extraction, the kind and adventuresome grandfather who helped tame the wilds of the Alaskan wilderness before it became a state, the colorful Sassoon family who were known as the “Rockefellers of the East”, getting rich selling opium to the Chinese and selling futures in rubber plantations across Asia, eventually having fifty British, Chinese, and European servants to wait on a family of four.

SNOWDROP

First flower, or nearly.

No one forces it to do anything.

The world is rapt with chaos. Ascendant reactionary movements across the globe, largely motivated by overt racism and xenophobia, have disrupted the convenient narrative of uninterrupted social progress, melding the frustrations of a weakening, shrinking, and resentful middle class into anger and fear.

Reading No Budu Please is like committing to the excavation of the continual traumas that occur within a post-colonial consciousness that is paradoxically both foreign and too familiar.

The day after Edward Abbey died, in the spring of 1989, his friends and family wrapped his body in a sleeping bag, packed it in dry ice, and loaded it into the bed of a blue Chevy pickup. They drove west out of Tucson, then south toward Mexico, cruising along the blacktop, then crunching dirt and rock as they chased the late-afternoon sun deep into the heart of the Sonoran Desert. There, amid the flat, alluvial basins and the ragged, looming ranges of the Cabeza Prieta Wildlife Refuge, somewhere just north of the borderline, in the brittlebush and creosote and ocotillo and saguaro stands, they committed Abbey’s body to the earth. They chiseled his epitaph into a slab of varnished basalt: “EDWARD PAUL ABBEY / 1927-1989 / ‘NO COMMENT.’”

Red light, where you were when the strike struck-to

and split, singeing thusly the center, burning

Reading Amparo Dávila’s stories is like accepting an invitation for tea at a haunted house. It starts out ordinary, mundane even, and before you know it, the key turns in the lock and you are trapped.

The deaths were coming more frequently now. It was almost a weekly expectation to learn, through an acquaintance, the phone, or even Facebook, of a new death. Friends and distant acquaintances died of cancer of the colon, breasts, prostate, bones, liver—it was almost always cancer. But also heart disease, lung disease, stroke, diabetes. Sometimes the death could be attributed to human error rather than a natural cause. A car accident, for example. Nonetheless, even these could usually be traced back to mistakes made by the human mind, dulling as it atrophied in old age. The ravages of time within the interior of our bodies, expressed through the degeneration or sudden demise of our exterior selves.

When I first picked up Sarah Smarsh’s book Heartland: A Memoir of Working Hard and Being Broke in the Richest Country on Earth, I expected to find a familiar story. Like Smarsh, I grew up in a rural farming community in America’s heartland. I knew the unceasing nature of work on a farm, though ours was just big enough to sustain my own family, and the weekly routine of clipping out coupons that determined which cereals you could buy at the grocery store that week.

Something burning or maybe already burnt

A cataract climbs a triage

How many bushels in an apple?

Welcome to Blurbed, a round-up of literary recommendations from the editors and contributors at the Columbia Journal! Each month, Blurbed features a curated list of things to read, events to attend and news from the Journal.

The Word Process is an interview series focusing on the writing process and aimed at illuminating the many ways that writers approach the same essential task. In this interview, Samantha Hunt talks about the “dead people’s things” that surround her writing desk, why writers should “revise forever,” and why she works on many projects at the same time.

These poems by the Iraqi visual artist and poet Ali Rashid have been translated from Arabic by Dr. Saleh Razzouk and Scott Minar.

“You do not have to be good,” writes Mary Oliver, at the beginning of her seminal poem, “Wild Geese,” and I thought of this poem often as I devoured Rebecca Traister’s new book, Good and Mad. What is it to be good, and good how, and good for whom?

How do we negotiate the spaces in which cultures meet? How do we balance our desire for tradition with an increasingly global world? What do we do when the understanding and support of a loving family isn’t enough?

Whatever is cool. Whatever is fine. Simple

is fine. Simple is more than fine. Home is fine too.

I’ll survive. As long as it’s something.