A 1994 trip to Syria and Jordan as an Arts America Speaker for the United States Information Agency began the group of poems for The Collector of Bodies. The manuscript stayed in a file until the Civil War began in Syria, March 18, 2011, the author's 70th birthday. The poems were retrieved, and the manuscript continued. Glancy wrote as an observer--as someone who had talked to the students in the universities--who had experienced a foreboding of what was ahead for Syria, especially after listening to the unrest of the students. In the bright sunlight, as they walked toward her, smiling, she...

The Keyboard Letters acknowledges the infinite variety of combinations of the alphabet that enable our different searches for meaning. As Captain Ahab after Moby Dick, and Salvadore Dali after images with which to arrange his frenetic world, QWERTYUIOPASDFGHJKLZXCVBNM is after the building blocks of language that face the rough weather of North Central Texas and the rougher terrain along a county road. Poetry is a map, a cartography of the Daliesque discovery of America and the Pequodian discovery of the whale, breaking the ship into what can be seen as mathematic formulas. Poetry is a...

Crippled in childhood, Mary Wesley, sister of John Wesley, founder of the Methodist Church, speaks of the Wesley household in first-person narrative built on the facts of her life.
Mary lived in a strict Christian family, one of 19 children, 10 of whom survived. Her mother, Susanna Wesley, imposed a regiment where ""not one child after a year old was heard to cry out."" Her father, Samuel Wesley, a minister at Epworth, could not provide for his family, and spent time in debtors prison. The family taunted Marys awkwardness and showed little sympathy for her affliction.
At one point Mary...

Love in one form or another is the commanding force of this new collection of short fiction. The Servitude of Love holds the revelations of love in different manifestations--love of work, love of another, love of journey, love of mission, love of justice, of foolishness, of duty. These thirteen stories take place along the north/south corridor of the central plains of America, in Afghanistan and Spain. Fictional characters such as Noe in Brownsville, Texas in the first story, and actual historical characters such as Joanna the Mad in 16th century Spain in the last story, speak of the...

No Word for the Sea is built on several layers of questioning: What is language? What is memory? Where does the mind go when the circuits shut down? The novel covers seven years in the lives of Solome and Stephen Savard in St. Paul, Minnesota. Stephen is provost at Cobson College, and Solome has raised three children. The events alternate between Stephen's first-person narrative and Solome's third-person narrative in accord with the breaking text of their lives. ""Once there was a common Indo-European language with words for winter and horse, but no word for the sea."" The history of the...

Unpapered brings together personal narratives of Indigenous writers to explore the meaning and limits of Native American identity beyond its legal margins.