August Kleinzahler’s collections include Green Sees Things in Waves; The Strange Hours Travellers Keep, which won the Griffin Poetry Prize; Sleeping It Off in Rapid City, which won the National Book Critics Circle Award; The Hotel Oneira and Snow Approaching on the Hudson. His memoir of his childhood in New Jersey, Cutty, One Rock, came out in 2005. Much of it first appeared in the LRB, as did many of the pieces included in Sallies, Romps, Portraits and Send-Offs: Selected Prose 2000-2016.
The river craft moves slowly upriver in the heart of Terra Magellanica,this forest land of earthquakes, hurricanes and volcanic eruptions,sitting low in the mud-coloured water, laden with its cargoof appoggiaturas, mordents, sarabandes, gavottes and trills,along with Domenico Zipoli in his black cassock, lately of Rome, Florence, Bolognaand Naples, scene of his famous contretemps with...
Trump’s wannabe stormtroopers were all eagerly lined up to do his bidding, with a quiescent Republican Senate and compromised Justice Department under my old high school classmate Bill Barr, terminally stained and diminished by their allegiance to the monster, or so one hopes. They are now, at very long last, beginning to distance themselves from him, after he incited his armed acolytes to break into the Capitol Building in Washington DC on Wednesday afternoon.
It was a fortnight before le couple coiffure turned up for the high season.A small flat her tante in Paris owned and let to the couple every year,and for many years. They were not young. Mlle’s discomfort was evidentfrom the moment they stepped off the bus that night, as if she found himunworthy somehow of such a gift as a free flat in St Tropez, or her, or both,or perhaps a general...
The enormous, blinking radio tower on Twin Peaks is half-hidden in mist, as it usually is this time of morning. And the N Judah streetcar rattles and squeals in and out of the tunnel below every fifteen minutes or so, as it routinely does, except on weekends and holidays when the intervals between trains are longer. I have woken to its sound and fallen asleep, often late, to the last train in the very early morning, for nearly 38 years now. Much else has changed around me here, but these two, the streetcar and mist, have not. I suppose they have become more a part of my identity than I realise.
The poems in Live from the Hong Kong Nile Club are taken from August Kleinzahler’s first six publications. All were small press books with relatively limited circulations – the first,...
In a power-rhyming slap-happy parody of Thirties doom-mongering published in 1938 William Empson famously had ‘Just a Smack at Auden’: What was said by Marx, boys, what did he...
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