Irish poet Eavan Boland passed away on April 27, 2020. She will be remembered for her finely wrought lyric meditations on womanhood, domesticity, and Ireland’s colonial history.

In Tiphanie Yanique’s story, “A Sense of Things,” which appeared in Columbia Journal in 2013, love is always already lost. Set in 1950, the story alternatingly inhabits the consciousnesses of Jacob and Anette, two lovers from the island of St. Thomas who are temporarily apart. Jacob is abroad in the US studying to be a pediatrician. Unlike Penelope, that other lonely and loving island dweller of literature, Anette quietly abandons Jacob for Franky, a firefighter with whom she is not in love, but who at least is in the same country. Anette and Franky appear in a movie together; Jacob sees the poster and books a flight home. Thus, the catalyst of this love-triangle story is a reproduced screen-image, an object in circulation: a stand-in for the way partnership itself is circulated among Yanique’s characters.—