April Bernard offers this beautiful reading of Elizabeth Bishop’s “The Map” in a review of new editions of Bishop’s poems, prose, and editorial correspondence.
Land lies in water; it is shadowed green.
Shadows, or are they shallows, at its edges
showing the line of long sea-weeded ledges
where weeds hang to the simple blue from green.
Or does the land lean down to lift the sea from under,
drawing it unperturbed around itself?
Along the fine tan sandy shelf
is the land tugging at the sea from under?
Here, at the outset, is the breathtaking surety of the voice that dares to offer apparent unsureness, inviting the reader to wonder along with it, in a kind of simulation of “real time,” as if the poem were being composed under our very eyes. Here is the understatement, the precise diction that looks deceptively casual; the verbal conflation of “shallow” with “shadow”; the noun “land,” given the verbs that would go naturally with its invisible rhyme “hand”—”lean down to lift,” “drawing,” Continue reading
Join our bounty of Boston-area writers, including beloved contributing editor and muse Melissa Green, and visiting eminences Eugene Ostashevsky and William Wadsworth, at the Pierre Menard Gallery on Sunday, January 23, for a kick-off reading! 
(Cape Colony, South Africa, 1902) It is a clear day, with few clouds. They have not been on horseback for a long time. The cool morning air is pleasant on Reitz’s cheeks. He is grateful for a chance to get out of camp at last, even for a day or two. The plan is to move in a northwesterly direction for an hour or three before turning sharp west and continuing in that direction until they reach the koppie where they are to wait for Davenport.
In 1928, a group of artists, poets, and provocateurs in Leningrad founds “Oberiu,” a nonsensical-sounding acronym for “The Association of Real Art.” Says patron Kazimir Malevich: “You are young troublemakers and I am an old one. Let’s see what we can do.” They shock and mesmerize the city with their outlandish performances and stunts. By 1930 Oberiu has been disbanded and its members driven underground. Amateur philosopher and polymath Leonid Lipavsky records their conversations as they gather to pursue their eclectic interests in private, and his friend Yakov Druskin saves the manuscript in secret for fifty years. They will appear for the first time in English in