The Ten Winners of the 2016 Whiting Awards Brian Blanchfield
N ON F I C T I ON N ON F I C T I ON POET RY
Mitchell S. Jackson
F I C T I ON
P OETRY P O E TRY
Alice Sola Kim Catherine Lacey
FICTION POETRY
LaTasha N. Nevada Diggs Madeleine George
DR A M A
FIC T I ON
J. D. Daniels
Layli Long Soldier Safiya Sinclair
Ocean Vuong
INTRODUCTIO N BY BEN FOUNTAIN
The Ten Winners of the 2016 Whiting Awards
ABOUT THE WHITING FOUNDATION AND AWARD INTRODUCTION BY BEN FOUNTAIN
6
Brian Blanchfield
10 12 14
24 26 28 30
LaTasha N. Nevada Diggs
Mitchell S. Jackson
18
22
J. D. Daniels
Madeleine George
16
20
5
Alice Sola Kim Catherine Lacey
Layli Long Soldier Safiya Sinclair
Ocean Vuong
THE WINNERS OF THE WHITING AWARD, 1985–2016
W H IT ING F O U ND ATI O N TR U S TE E S
Peter Pennoyer, President John N. Irwin III, Treasurer Amanda Foreman Kumar Mahadeva Kate Douglas Torrey Magdalena Zavalía Miguens, Secretary T R U ST EES EM ER I TI
Antonia M. Grumbach Robert M. Pennoyer
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ABOUT THE
Whiting Foundation and Award
The Whiting Foundation provides support for writers and scholars who astonish us by expanding the boundaries of art and understanding. Since 1985, the Foundation has supported creative writing through the Whiting Awards, given annually to ten emerging writers in fiction, nonfiction, poetry, and drama. The awards are based on early accomplishment and the promise of great work to come. The Foundation invites nominators from across the country whose work brings them in contact with individuals of extraordinary talent to propose a single candidate each. The pool of nominators changes annually, and has included writers, professors, editors, agents, critics, booksellers, artistic directors of theaters, dramaturgs, and directors of literary festivals. Winners are chosen by a selection committee comprised of a small group of recognized writers, literary scholars, and editors appointed every year by the Foundation. By tradition, nominators and selectors serve anonymously to allow them complete freedom in choosing the strongest candidates. Whiting winners have gone on to receive numerous prestigious awards and fellowships, and their work has shaped and advanced literature in this country over the past three decades.
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INTRODUCTION
Ben Fountain
Here’s a proposition: It all depends on language. Society, civilization, progress, whatever you want to call it: the entire project depends on the quality of our thought and expression, our ability to put words to the reality of a thing. This is a rare and even radical act in an age where so much of the language that’s thrown at us is trying to sell something—a product, a lifestyle, a political agenda, an alleged means to a more beautiful version of ourselves. Language whose sole purpose is to mislead and distort, to numb out and dumb down. To call it by another name: the language of advertising. But what’s wrong with being, as the Pink Floyd song says, “comfortably numb”? Nothing, maybe, until life hits us with something real, and maybe it’s in the existential moments of our lives that we most fully realize how false most of modern discourse is, when we’re faced with the kinds of crises that lead us to ask, Why?, and that have no clear answer. “It is difficult / to get the news from poems / yet men die miserably every day / for lack / of what is found there.” These lines are from a poem
by William Carlos Williams, who, in addition to being one of the finest poets this country has produced, was a family doctor who delivered thousands of babies, dealt with death in a hundred forms. Williams had a close working relationship with the most basic realities of human life, and here he is staking a claim to poetry’s fundamental usefulness. What an outrageous proposition for this day and age, that poems are useful, even necessary—that they might actually save lives. But maybe not so outrageous when you consider that it’s the job of writers to see things as they truly are; to find the language that describes human experience fully, without sentimentality, or a political agenda, or a wish to please the reader. Keeping the language accurate, vital, true to all the mystery and challenge of reality, that’s the job of writers, and short of the immediate saving of lives—Dr. Williams’s other job—I can think of no work that’s more important. Congratulations to the Whiting Award winners of 2016. Keep writing as though the fate of the world depends on you. Because it does.
BEN FOUNTAIN has received the PEN/Hemingway Award, the Barnes & Noble Discover Award for Fiction, an O. Henry Prize, and two Pushcart Prizes, among other honors and awards. He is the author of the collection Brief Encounters with Che Guevara and the novel Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk, a winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award for Fiction and a finalist for the National Book Award. He and his family live in Dallas, Texas. He won a Whiting Award for fiction in 2007.
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The Ten Winners of the 2016 Whiting Awards
10
NONFICTION
Brian Blanchfield
A few things became clear in the moments and months after I was attacked by a dog at age nine. Within months, it was clear that my consequent fear of dogs had engaged a far greater fear. Within moments, it was clear that the dog, our dog, Sam, was my father’s dog, loyal to him foremost. Sam, a mature blue-black purebred Chow, rushed to the door one evening just as I did, to meet my father who had been away awhile. My mother was in the kitchen. We had just moved back to Charlotte, from Paris, Tennessee, undoing the relocation we all had made when he left Roadway to work for Transcon nine months earlier. He was sort of at large, still, out on days-long interstate truck runs and still stationed in Tennessee, without us, orchestrating the sale of the life that never quite took. The tractor trailer he parked outside shook the Charlotte house a bit. At the back door, his dog and his son had both come to welcome him; and when he appeared there, Sam turned to his rival in the tight space of the mud room and in a single motion, prefaced by a low growl, seized and ripped the flesh off the right side my face, cheek to jawbone—so that in the stunned minutes thereafter, both of my parents would later say they could see my clenched back teeth when my mouth was closed. Sam was banished instantly to the back lot, or retreated there ashamed, confused; and swiftly we made preparations to ride to the emergency room. Despite spilling blood and saliva where my face had been, I was numb to the pain, doing as I was instructed, completely mobile, cooperative with the towels, functioning in shock. On my father’s lap—so rarely availed to me—in the passenger seat, as my mother drove, I was prevented from flipping the visor down to see the damage in the mirror but repeated often that one desire, to see for
BRIAN BLANCHFIELD ,
a poet and essayist, is the author of three books, including two collections of poetry: Not Even Then (University of California Press, 2004) and A Several World (Nightboat Books, 2014), which received the 2014 James Laughlin Award from the Academy of American Poets and was long-listed for the 2014 National Book Award for Poetry. His third book, Proxies, is a collection of essays forthcoming from Nightboat in April 2016. His recent work has appeared in Harper’s, The Nation, BOMB, The Brooklyn Rail, The Paris Review, Brick, Guernica, Lana Turner, and other publications. Since 2010, Blanchfield has been a poetry editor of Fence, and he currently serves as a guest editor of the PEN Poetry Series. Blanchfield is originally from Winston-Salem, North Carolina, and lives in Tucson, Arizona.
myself what was clearly disturbing my parents, neither of them even thirty years old, it now occurs to me, the year they divorced. What was the damage, was the question, yes, but also, what does it look like inside me? I could hardly contain myself. A plastic surgeon was airlifted in, and that night I had reconstructive surgery, and came away sewn up with many stitches inside and outside my mouth. A phenomenal operation, everyone said. It was 1982, and with insurance then, I suppose, a secretary and a truck driver could afford it. I was swollen and in bandages for weeks, a pathetic, dopey monster at school for a while; and then the wound became scar and for the next eight years tightened and traveled from my cheek to my chin as I grew into the face I have. There are a lot of nerve endings gathered in it, and it drives me a little crazy, distributes a sort of unsettling, illocable energy within, when a lover plays with that part of my face. I feel the same about my navel. It’s my recollection that the Winicottian psychologist and essayist Adam Phillips himself extrapolates broadly from his analysis of tickling; but, if not, the generality I have found so insightful is mine: beyond any fear is a greater circumambient fear—a terror—that one will be insufficiently able to hold that fear. From “On Containment, Permitting Shame, Error and Guilt, Myself the Single Source”
12
NONFICTION
J. D. Daniels J. D. DANIELS studied at the University of Louisville and Boston University. His writing has appeared in The Paris Review, AGNI, n+1, Oxford American, The Best American Essays, and elsewhere. Daniels is the recipient of The Paris Review’s 2013 Terry Southern Prize. His collection, The Correspondence, will be published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux in 2017.
We sang about the blood Wednesday nights at church suppers, Thursday nights at choir practices, mornings and evenings on Sundays, and every summer at a peacock-ridden revival camp in Alabama. The old rugged cross, stained with blood so divine. There is a fountain filled with blood. I must needs go on the blood-sprinkled way. He bled, He died to save me. How I love to proclaim it, redeemed by the blood. They vainly purify themselves, said Heraclitus, by defiling themselves with blood, just as if one who had stepped into the mud were to wash his feet in mud. Any man who marked him doing thus would deem him mad. Our pastor had a method. After his sermon, we sang “Just As I Am” over and over again—without one plea, but that Thy blood was shed for me, and so on. We would sing until someone gave in. We sang all day. It was the same unrelenting method of the middle school phys-ed coach who, perceiving that Weak Henry was weak, hit on the technique of making the whole class do extra push-ups until Henry finished his
allotted twenty. Henry couldn’t make it happen. We did twenty more, thirty more, forty; and after class, Demetrius and Alonzo beat Henry in the locker room until he peed. One morning, after an hour of “Just As I Am,” my mother shrieked and fell into the aisle. My father helped her stand. His face was strange. The two of them knelt and prayed at the altar. A nice old lady wearing a white gauze eye patch smiled. I waited to see what the people who told me what to do were going to tell me to do next. It was this child grown into a man, then, if anyone ever grows up, who now drove past Lynn Camp Baptist Church, who drove past Hazel Fork Holiness Church and Living Waters Pentecostal Church, who drove past Faith Tabernacle Pentecostal Church and Turkey Creek Baptist Church short of breath, sweating like a sinner, drowning in blood. I played Jesus one year and Judas the next in the passion play. I taught Vacation Bible School, and visited and sang hymns to the homebound, and, all that rigamarole having been accomplished, I chased the preacher’s daughter through the cornfield after Sunday evening services until I caught her. And my father mowed the field out back of our church. He helped Deacon Jack repaint the sanctuary and he helped Deacon Willy reshingle the roof. He cooked and served at the Wednesday night church suppers and was happy to do it. But he didn’t have much time for what he called churchified people. “I find it difficult to believe that the Creator of the universe gives a fuck if I drink a cold beer on a sunny day,” my father said. “These people can’t say sugar, they just got to say sucrose. Meanwhile they don’t have no more idea what God wants from me than the man in the moon. It’s my own dick I’m talking about, and I can jump up and down on it like a pogo stick if I want to.” From “Letter from Kentucky”
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POETRY
LaTasha N. Nevada Diggs
Benihana
rūma moe : bedroom cuisine
she wishes Rocky usada cookbooks
niho : nitro libido
samurai diced & sliced
sweet & sour calypso in a hotei tiki mug
baby-girl knows he burned the rice
she wishes Rocky a rave kei : at Che Fong’s bungalow uru : enter the binghi harps played by Duke Lukela she wishes Rocky tossed oriental shrimp y huevos in a hot tub korā : over there Kono Kalakaua is manning the grill his backgammon trophy awaits him in heaven an afterlife supply of jheri curl kits saketini on the house
a rave in his name
in virtuous timbre she mantras, “come now, no more faking blackouts.” Japanese custom
Rocky’s poly
konā: there, ka tākaro ngā tamariki ki waho with Ginsu knives the children will play outside Chin Ho Kelley is attending to them she wishes Rocky muziek di zumbi, a day with Sizzla in a hot-air balloon a Hummer-converted ice cream truck te tae : the color of kikorangi : blue
a collage of sugar cones & strawberry road on DVD his wrestling pecs in high-res
he did not patent the fortune cookie, but . . .
pequino manu, no strife from Bobos down Lenox Ave. pūrnimā : night of full moon, night of vaudevillian lineage someone did not read the omikuji she wishes Rocky an odò kāshmīrī dam gōsht pepper steak
hea : where?
mua : in front of heroes & foes konei : here she wishes Rocky moe : sleep passage in not an abébuu adekai fashioned like his teppanyaki but his speedboat severing Bullwinkle’s spleen somewhere in Iceland she wishes Rocky jouk & Wonderbras abundant two centerfolds for the price of one
a rave in his name
a place where he eats his celestial tsujiura senbei uru : enter again the binghi harps played by Duke Lukela he’s finally escaped the Blacks and the Jews
A writer, vocalist, and sound artist, LATASHA N. NEVADA DIGGS is the author of TwERK (Belladonna*, 2013), a collection of poems, songs, and myths, and the cofounder and coeditor of Coon Bidness and SO4. Her work has appeared in many publications, including Rattapallax, Nocturnes, Spoken Word Revolution Redux, Ploughshares, Mandorla, P.M.S., jubilat, Everything But the Burden, ART21 Magazine, Palabra, and Fence. Her interdisciplinary work has been featured at MoMA, the Walker Art Center, the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth, and the 2015 Venice Biennale. As an independent curator, artistic director, and producer, LaTasha has produced literary/musical events for Lincoln Center Out of Doors, BAMCafé, Black Rock Coalition, the David Rubenstein Atrium, and El Museo del Barrio. A native of Harlem, Diggs has been the recipient of numerous awards from organizations such as the New York Foundation for the Arts, the Barbara Deming Memorial Fund, the Laundromat Project, the National Endowment for the Arts, the Japan–United States Friendship Commission, and Creative Capital.
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MADELEINE GEORGE ’s
DRAM A
Madeleine George
ELIZA : I have to change my
ELIZA pours a little Jim
number.
Beam into a plastic cup, removes a Twizzler from the bag, and holds up both.
WATSON : You don’t like
your number? She silences her phone, pockets it. ELIZA : I like it fine. Frank
likes it too much. This is his eighteenth call since I said I wasn’t speaking to him anymore. By which I meant, literally, (precise) that I would never be speaking to him anymore. He knows I don’t say anything I don’t literally mean. I’m not about games. WATSON
(a trigger):
Games? ELIZA : No, I’m not about
games. Never mind, I should shut up, you’re not even listening.
(continuing): Little known fact that you can file away in your mental wheelhouse, there: Twizzlers dipped in Jim Beam makes an excellent late-night snack.
ELIZA
WATSON grins, a little
impishly. WATSON : I’ll be sure to
keep that in mind. ELIZA : This is how we roll
now at Digital Fist, LLC. Nothing but class. ELIZA dips the Twizzler,
bites the end off, sips the whiskey.
(continuing): I’d offer you some, but I know how you feel about WATSON (ardent): I’m listen- the stuff. ing to every word you say. WATSON : Yeah, thanks for ELIZA
(simple): Thanks.
ELIZA
the offer, but I’m good.
plays have been produced at Playwrights Horizons, Clubbed Thumb, Shotgun Players, and Perseverance Theater, among other venues. She has been the recipient of a MacDowell
(toasting him): You’re the best.
ELIZA
(reflects) You know, it’s not just that we couldn’t have a conversation about anything that was important to me. We couldn’t have a conversation about anything that was important to me, but that didn’t distinguish him from ninety-eight percent of the other human beings on the planet. It’s that we couldn’t have a conversation and he still needed to be on me, constantly, every second of our lives. And he seemed so serene when I met him. I swear, if he could have left me alone for five minutes I might not have had to leave him alone forever. She drinks. WATSON : It sounds like
that’s too bad.
Fellowship, the Princess Grace Playwriting Award, the Outer Critics Circle John Gassner Award, and the Jane Chambers Award. A resident playwright at New Dramatists, George was also a founding member of the collective 13P (Thirteen Playwrights, Inc.), which won an Obie Award. Her play The (curious case of the) Watson Intelligence was nominated for a Pulitzer Prize in 2014. For seven years, George was the director of the Bard College satellite campus at Bayview Correctional Facility in Manhattan. She is originally from Amherst, Massachusetts, and is currently based in Brooklyn, New York.
ELIZA : It is too fucking
ELIZA : No, I mean, sort
ELIZA : How far are you
bad. (beat) Hey, don’t use that word.
of, but what’s the other one . . . ?
now? You getting there? WATSON : I’m twenty-six
WATSON : What word?
WATSON : Do you mean
percent complete.
ELIZA : “Fucking.” Strike
Romancing the Stone?
ELIZA : Not bad. You
“fucking.”
ELIZA : No—what’s the one
WATSON : “Fucking”
where Michael Douglas spends the entire two hours in an unrelieved seizure of violent rage?
get through this initial resequencing, and I will build you out so gorgeously in beta that the venture capital guys at Pearson Klein will be falling all over themselves to fund Phase Two. I’m going to make you irresistibly sexy.
stricken. ELIZA : I keep forgetting.
I need a swear jar or something. (drinks) I guess what I really resent is that I’m being told that I’m acting irrationally, that I’m acting irrationally, when he’s the one running around like Michael Douglas in that movie. Which movie am I thinking of?
WATSON searches —micropause. WATSON : Movies that
WATSON : Do you mean
associate “Michael Douglas” with “violent rage” include Wall Street, WATSON : That sounds great. The War of the Roses, Basic Instinct, and Falling ELIZA : In fact, I should Down. really leave you alone. I shouldn’t be clogging ELIZA : That’s the one, that’s the one! Thank you. up your brain with dumb search tasks. But you’re Nice work. just such a satisfying WATSON glows brighter. conversationalist. You WATSON (warm): I’m so always have an answer for glad I could help. everything.
Fatal Attraction?
ELIZA drinks. She checks
WATSON searches—a tiny
beat.
the time on her phone.
From The (curious case of the) Watson Intelligence
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FICTION
Mitchell S. Jackson
Peoples, you listening? Bet. This is how it go. If you’re cold enough they name you. Clutch or Jack Knife or K-Dub or 3-D or Dead Eye or D-Reid or Big Third or Smooth or DaBell—score twenty or thirty a season, and bam, you’re Stu or Pickle or Free or Fish or Big Blass or King Cole or Doc—they’ve christened you T-hop or B-hop or Pooh or Fluff or the Honey Bee or Houseguest or B-Moore or J. D. or Bookie. Handle your biz lugis luge and everywhere they’ll say your name, call out T-Cage, T. T., Gumby, Banger, A-Train, Nickle, Action, P-Strick, JoJo, L. V., T-Jones, Blazer. We’re talking MVPs and state champs and first-team All-Everythings, dudes who any day you wanted it would kill your weak ass at the park. In my city, hoop’s the hegemony.
debut novel The Residue Years (Bloomsbury, 2013) was praised by publications including The New York Times, The Paris Review, and The Times (London). The novel won the Ernest Gaines Prize for Literary Excellence. It was also a finalist for the Center for Fiction’s Flaherty-Dunnan First Novel Prize, the PEN/Hemingway Award for First Fiction, and the Hurston/Wright Legacy Award. Jackson’s honors include fellowships from TED, the Lannan Foundation, the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, and the Center for Fiction. His writing has appeared in The New York Times Book Review, Salon, and Tin House, among other publications. He serves on the faculty at New York University and Columbia University. MITCHELL S. JACKSON ’s
In the Rose City, the P, what the deal is, if they name you, you’re anointed. And in the P that’s what we cherish, what we love if nothing else: Year after year after year we harangue who’s greatest of the ones who dropped 40s and 50s pre a three-pointer, which phenoms scored 60! 70! 80! Guys named J-Bird or Zelly-Roo or T. B. or D-Stoud or Slash or T-Bone or T-Ross or T-Hamp or Juice or Ice or Silk—middle school man-childs who played not a lick beyond the eighth, or the luckierthan-thous who hang-timed off to college handcuffed by the city’s collective hope. The General and 2-Ounce and Stretch and Big City and Slider and Truck and Duke and the one we named the GOAT: legends, a few of them, all-leaguers in every league they played. My word, a nickname is a christening, meaning you got a shot, meaning they think you can go, which is one chance more than most of us, so no wonder the chosen are all there is to speak of. No wonder when, for most, hoop’s about our only shot to be better and bigger than the rest, to secure a life that counts. But on the flip side, fall short and then what? From The Residue Years
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FICTION
Alice Sola Kim
Deena didn’t invite me to her birthday party, so I crashed it. Specifically, I inhabited every last person at her party. I waited until after everyone got into her apartment. I became thirty-six people. The sensation was almost too much, I could barely carry on ten conversations and one of me got a terrible nosebleed that poured out of my nostrils as suddenly and smoothly as poured wine. Somewhere else in the room, a beer bottle slipped from my hand, and rolled over on the floor. A puddle fanned out around my feet and burbled quietly to itself. Keep. It. Together. This is the last time, I had said into the mirror at home. This time something has to happen. Maybe we can all line up. Maybe Deena will choose one of me. Maybe Deena will choose the one she might be able to love from a catalog. I think we can discuss this like adults. My chest was angry and red from repeated applications of toothpaste.
ALICE SOLA KIM ’s
fiction has appeared in or is forthcoming from McSweeney’s Literary Quarterly, The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, Tin House, Lenny Letter, Asimov’s Science Fiction, and Strange Horizons, among other publications. Kim was a MacDowell Colony Fellow and has received grants and scholarships from Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference and the Elizabeth George Foundation. She is currently working on her first novel and lives in Brooklyn, New York.
I was Vishal, one of Deena’s coworkers from the health bureau. I said to her, “You look exhausted. Is everything okay?” She said, “I don’t know. Things haven’t been going well for me.” “How so?” I said. Vishal’s mustache felt heavy against my lip. Deena smiled a little, a smile that expressed only tiredness. “A lot of people have been hitting on me these days.” “Isn’t that a good thing?” Isn’t it? “No. It is not.” She had lost a bit of weight, hadn’t she? From behind her, I saw how the pale knobs of her vertebrae jutted out above the neck of her sweater. She said, “But if I tell you why it’s not a good thing, you’re going to think I’ve gone insane.” “Oh, Deena,” I said. I gave her a careful pat on the back. She started to cry. I came closer to her, folded my arms around her. It’s okay, it’s okay, I said. Oh, I’m so sorry. At that, Deena lifted her head. We had all stopped talking, stopped playing at being thirty-six different people at a party. We were thirtysix people who were all me and all loved Deena, looking at only her and wanting her and pressing ever closer. “Oh no,” she said. “Get away.” “I’ll be whatever you want,” we said. “See how?” She was shaking her head as though she could shake us all out of her sight. Imagine a room full of people who love you, who adore your body and thoughts and words. I can’t even imagine such riches. Deena was lucky. We were a kicking chorus line of people who loved Deena! A battalion of soldiers who would give their lives for Deena! A synchronized swimming team who fluttered and kicked for an audience of only Deena! From “We Love Deena”
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CATHERINE LACEY has
FICTION
Catherine Lacey
published work in Oxford American, McSweeney’s Quarterly, The New York Times, VICE, AFAR, and elsewhere. She was a finalist for the NYPL Young Lions Fiction Award, a recipient of a NYFA Artist’s Fellowship, and a resident at the Omi International Arts Center. In the fall of 2016, she will be the Kittredge Visiting Writer at the University of Montana. She is the author of the novel Nobody Is Ever Missing (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2014). Her second novel and first story collection are forthcoming from Farrar, Straus and Giroux.
They looked and made quick calculations: a 7 percent chance of con artistry, 4 percent chance of prostitution, 50 percent chance of mental instability, 20 percent chance of obnoxiousness, a 4 percent chance of violent behavior. I was probably none of these things, at least not at first, but to all the passing drivers and everyone else in this country I could be anything, so they just slowed, had a look, made a guess, kept driving. Women, they’d squint quickly, make a worried face, continue on. Men (I later learned) stared from the farthest distance—their eyes trained to stay on me in case I was something they needed to shoot or capture—but they hardly ever stopped. Up close, I was not so promising: just a woman wearing a backpack, a cardigan, green sneakers. And young-seeming, of course, because you must seem young to get away with this kind of vulnerability, standing on a road’s shoulder, showing the pale underside of your arm. You must seem both totally harmless and able, if necessary, to push a knife through any tender gut. But I didn’t know any of this at first—I just stood and waited, not knowing that wearing sunglasses would always leave me stranded, not knowing that wearing my hair down meant something I did not mean, not knowing that my posture had to be so carefully calibrated, that I should always stand like a dancer ready to leap. Only two cars and fifteen minutes passed before someone stopped, a black truck driven by a sun-wrinkled old lady wearing a straw hat. Into town? she asked, and I took this as a chance not to make a decision, to just agree. While we drove she asked me about myself and I found it impossible to answer anything honestly. She asked what had brought me to New Zealand and I said that my husband had. She asked me what my
husband did and I said he was a farmer. Well, he wants to be a farmer, I said. That’s why he’s here. Everything grows here, the old woman said proudly. All sorts of plants and other things. Do you have children? I laughed by accident, the kind of laugh that didn’t say you thought something was funny. No. Well, my goodness. I suppose women really are putting off having children these days. You ought to get to it. I only bring it up because there is no joy in life greater than an empty house. Don’t let the other women fool you with this empty-nest-syndrome stuff. Life gets better once the kids are out and the sooner you have them the sooner they can leave. Ah. Okay, I said. What’s even better is finally being a widow. The woman started laughing and laughing and laughing so much I felt like I had to laugh, too, so I did and then I realized we were laughing at how her husband was dead, which really didn’t seem so funny, and I think we realized that at the same time, and we both stopped laughing and there was that deeply quiet moment after two people have laughed too much and we let that quiet moment stay for the rest of the drive. During that silence, I thought of the night when my husband and I were having one of the arguments about the way we argue and I went into the kitchen to get a glass of water but instead picked up a knife because I was thinking about stabbing myself in the face—not actually considering stabbing myself in the face, but thinking that it would be a physical expression of how I felt—and picked up a chef’s knife, our heavy good one that I used for everything from cutting soft fruit to impaling pumpkins, and looked at it, laughed a noiseless laugh, put the chef’s knife down, poured myself a glass of water, and drank it fast, until I choked a little, and I went back to arguing with my husband and he didn’t know about my face-stabbing thoughts and it made me even angrier that he didn’t know about my face-stabbing thoughts, that he couldn’t just intuit these things, look into my eyes and know that the way he spoke to me was a plain waste of our life—but here in the car with the widowed stranger I didn’t have to feel any of those feelings anymore because I had left my husband and our arguments and my chef’s knife and I had come to this country where I could laugh, so gently, gently laugh at things that were actually not funny. From Nobody Is Ever Missing
24
POETRY
Layli Long Soldier
One. H^e Sapa is a horn is a mountain, is a black horn or black mountain, as it is the same in this language. Remember. And is not a black hill, not Paha Sapa, by any name you call it. When it lives in past tense, one would say it was not Red Horn either; was not a rider on mount on horse and did not lead a cavalry down the river and bend, not decoy to ambush and knee buckle to ten or twenty, perhaps every horse face in water. Its rank is a mountain and must live as a mountain as a black horn from the base to the black horn tip. See it as you come, you approach. To remember it, this is like gravel. Two. Because drag changes when spoken of in the past i.e. he was dragged, or they drug him down the long road, the pale rock and brown. Down dust, a knocking path. And to drag has a begin point (though two are considered): begins when man is bound; begins also with one first tug. So we take the word to our own uses and say: it begins with his head on the ground with his hair loose under shoulders and shirt with snaps, they’re mother-of-pearl. Then begins a yank and slide, begins his skin and scalp— begins a break a tear, red to pink to this precious white; then begins what is his skull, the glisten of star to bone.
holds a BFA from the Institute of American Indian Arts and an MFA from Bard College. She has served as a contributing editor of Drunken Boat. Her poems have appeared in The American Poet, The American Reader, The Kenyon Review Online, and other publications. She is the recipient of the 2015 NACF National Artist Fellowship and a 2015 Lannan Literary Fellowship. Her work of poetry, WHEREAS, will be published by Graywolf Press in 2017. Long Soldier resides in Tsaile, Arizona, where she is an English faculty member at Diné College. LAYLI LONG SOLDIER
Three.
The space in me you see is this place
This is how to place you in the space in which to see
This is how you see the space in which to place me
To see this space see how you place me in you
From “H^e Sapa”
26
POETRY
Safiya Sinclair
Home Have I forgotten it— wild conch-shell dialect, black apostrophe curled tight on my tongue?
to still believe in anything. My diction now as straight
Or how the Spanish built walls of broken glass to keep me out
as my hair; that stranger we’ve long stopped searching for.
but the Doctor Bird kept chasing and raking me in: This place
But if somehow our half-sunken hearts could answer, I would cup
is your place, wreathed in red Sargassum, ancient driftwood
my mouth in warm bowls over the earth, and kiss the wet dirt
nursed on the pensive sea. The ramshackle altar I visited
of home, taste Bogue-mud and one long orange peel for skin.
often, packed full with fish-skull, bright with lignum vitae plumes:
I’d open my ear for sugar cane and long stalks of gungo peas
Father, I have asked so many miracles of it. To be patient and forgiving,
to climb in. I’d swim the sea still lapsing in a soldered frame,
to be remade for you in some small wonder. And what a joy
the sea that again and again calls out my name.
Portrait of Eve as the Anaconda I too am gathering the vulgarity of botany, the eye and its nuclei for mischief. Of Man, redacted I came, am coming, fasting, starving carved myself a selfish idol, its shell unsuitable. I, twice discarded, arrived thornside, and soon outgrew his reptilian sheen. A fine specimen. Let me have it. Something inviolate; splayed in bird-lime, legs an exposed anemone, against jailbait August, its X-ray sky. This light a Gorgon-slick, polygamous doom. And God again calling much too late, who aches to stick an ache in my unmentionable. His Primal Plant remains elusive— Wildfire and pathogen, blood-knot of human fleshed there in His beard. How I am hot for it. Call me murderess, a glowing engine timed to blow. Watch it go with unjealousy, shadow. Let me have it. This maidenhead-primeval schemes what ovule of cruel invention; the Venus-trap, the menses. And how many ways to announce this guilt: whore’s nest of ague, supernova, wild stigmata. Womb. I boast a vogue sacrosanctum. Engorging shored pornographies, the cells’ unruly strain, rogue empire multiplying for a thousand virile thousand years; my wings pinned wide in parthenogenesis, such miraculous display.
SAFIYA SINCLAIR was born and raised in Montego Bay, Jamaica. Her debut collection, Cannibal, won the Prairie Schooner Book Prize in Poetry for 2015, and will be published by University of Nebraska Press in 2016. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Poetry, The Kenyon Review, Boston Review, Gulf Coast, The Gettysburg Review, Prairie Schooner, TriQuarterly, Callaloo, The Iowa Review, and elsewhere. She has been awarded a writing fellowship from the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, the Amy Clampitt Residency Award, and an Academy of American Poets Prize. She is also the recipient of a 2015 Ruth Lilly and Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Poetry Fellowship, and was the winner of the Boston Review’s eighteenth annual poetry contest. Sinclair received an MFA in poetry from the University of Virginia, and is currently completing a PhD in creative writing and literature from the University of Southern California.
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POETRY
Ocean Vuong
Telemachus Like any good son, I pull my father out of the water, drag him by his hair through white sand, his knuckles carving a trail the waves rush in to erase. Because the city beyond the shore is no longer where we left it. Because the bombed cathedral is now a cathedral of trees. I kneel beside him to see how far I might sink. Do you know who I am, Ba? But the answer never comes. The answer is the bullet hole in his back, brimming with seawater. He is so still I think he could be anyone’s father, found the way a green bottle might appear at a boy’s feet containing a year he has never touched. I touch his ears. No use. I turn him over. To face it. The cathedral in his sea-black eyes. The face not mine—but one I will wear to kiss all my lovers good-night: the way I seal my father’s lips with my own & begin the faithful work of drowning.
OCEAN VUONG holds a BA from Brooklyn College and will complete an MFA from NYU in 2016. His poems have appeared in Best New Poets, Harvard Review, Kenyon Review, The Nation, New Republic, The New Yorker, Poetry, and The American Poetry Review. He has published two chapbooks, No (2013) and Burnings (2010); his first full-length collection, Night Sky with Exit Wounds, will be published by Copper Canyon Press in 2016. Vuong is the recipient of a 2014 Ruth Lilly and Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Poetry Fellowship from the Poetry Foundation. He is originally from Saigon and lives in New York City.
Homewrecker & this is how we danced: our mothers’ white dresses spilling from our feet, late August turning our hands dark red. & this is how we loved: a fifth of vodka & an afternoon in the attic, your fingers through my hair—my hair a wildfire. We covered our ears & your father’s tantrum turned to heartbeats. When our lips touched the day closed into a coffin. In the museum of the heart there are two headless people building a burning house. There was always the shotgun above the fireplace. Always another hour to kill—only to beg some god to give it back. If not the attic, the car. If not the car, the dream. If not the boy, his clothes. If not alive, put down the phone. Because the year is a distance we’ve traveled in circles. Which is to say: this is how we danced: alone in sleeping bodies. Which is to say: this is how we loved: a knife on the tongue turning into a tongue.
30
The Winners of the Whiting Award 1985–2016
Raymond Abbott, Fiction, 1985 André Aciman, Fiction, 1995 David Adjmi, Drama, 2010 Ellen Akins, Fiction, 1989 Daniel Alarcón, Fiction, 2004 Jeffery Renard Allen, Fiction, Poetry, 2002 Mindy Aloff, Nonfiction, 1987 Elizabeth Arnold, Poetry, 2002 John Ash, Poetry, 1986 Kirsten Bakis, Fiction, 2004 Catherine Barnett, Poetry, 2004 Elif Batuman, Nonfiction, 2010 Jo Ann Beard, Nonfiction, 1997 Mischa Berlinski, Fiction, 2008
Ciaran Berry, Poetry, 2012
Hannah Dela Cruz Abrams, Fiction,
Sherwin Bitsui, Poetry, 2006
Nonfiction, 2013
Scott Blackwood, Fiction, 2011
LaTasha N. Nevada Diggs, Poetry, 2016
Brian Blanchfield, Nonfiction, 2016
Trudy Dittmar, Nonfiction, 2003
Judy Blunt, Nonfiction, 2001
Matt Donovan, Poetry, 2010
Courtney A. Brkic, Fiction, 2003
Mark Doty, Poetry, 1994
Joel Brouwer, Poetry, 2001
Jennifer duBois, Fiction, 2013
Jericho Brown, Poetry, 2009
Bruce Duffy, Fiction, 1988
Michael Burkard, Poetry, 1988
Pam Durban, Fiction, 1987
Michael Byers, Fiction, 1998
Stuart Dybek, Fiction, 1985
Sarah Shun-Lien Bynum, Fiction, 2005
Gerald Early, Nonfiction, 1988
Ryan Call, Fiction, 2011
Russell Edson, Poetry, 1989
Sheila Callaghan, Drama, 2007
Kim Edwards, Fiction, 2002
Anthony Carelli, Poetry, 2015
Louis Edwards, Fiction, 1994
Hayden Carruth, Poetry, 1986
Erik Ehn, Drama, 1997
Emily Carter, Fiction, 2001
Gretel Ehrlich, Nonfiction, 1987
Joan Chase, Fiction, 1987
Nancy Eimers, Poetry, 1998
Alexander Chee, Fiction, 2003
Deborah Eisenberg, Fiction, 1987
Dan Chiasson, Poetry, 2004
Thomas Sayers Ellis, Poetry, 2005
Don Mee Choi, Poetry, 2011
Jeffrey Eugenides, Fiction, 1993
Paul Clemens, Nonfiction, 2011
Roger Fanning, Poetry, 1992
Robert Cohen, Fiction, 2000
Anderson Ferrell, Fiction, 1996
Christopher Cokinos, Nonfiction, 2003
Kathleen Finneran, Nonfiction, 2001
Amanda Coplin, Fiction, 2013
Ben Fountain, Fiction, 2007
Leopoldine Core, Fiction, 2015
Jonathan Franzen, Fiction, 1988
Eduardo C. Corral, Poetry, 2011
Kennedy Fraser, Nonfiction, 1994
Mark Cox, Poetry, 1987
Ian Frazier, Nonfiction, 1989
Douglas Crase, Poetry, 1985
Nell Freudenberger, Fiction, 2005
Justin Cronin, Fiction, 2002
Forrest Gander, Poetry, 1997
Stanley Crouch, Nonfiction, 1991
Cristina García, Fiction, 1996
Michael Cunningham, Fiction, 1995
Madeleine George, Drama, 2016
Michael Dahlie, Fiction, 2010
David Gewanter, Poetry, 2002
Charles D’Ambrosio, Fiction, 2006
Melissa James Gibson, Drama, 2002
J. D. Daniels, Nonfiction, 2016
Dagoberto Gilb, Fiction, 1993
Lydia Davis, Fiction, 1988
Samantha Gillison, Fiction, 2000
Connie Deanovich, Poetry, 1997
Aracelis Girmay, Poetry, 2015
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Jody Gladding, Poetry, 1997
Mitchell S. Jackson, Fiction, 2016
Allison Glock, Nonfiction, 2004
Tyehimba Jess, Poetry, 2006
Molly Gloss, Fiction, 1996
Adam Johnson, Fiction, 2009
Rebecca Goldstein, Fiction, 1991
Denis Johnson, Fiction, 1986
Allegra Goodman, Fiction, 1991
Jenny Johnson, Poetry, 2015
Jorie Graham, Poetry, 1985
R. S. Jones, Fiction, 1992
Lucy Grealy, Nonfiction, Poetry, 1995
A. Van Jordan, Poetry, 2004
Elana Greenfield, Drama, Fiction, 2004
Dan Josefson, Fiction, 2015
Linda Gregg, Poetry, 1985
Rajiv Joseph, Drama, 2009
Gordon Grice, Nonfiction, 1999
Cynthia Kadohata, Fiction, 1991
Virginia Grise, Drama, 2013
Agymah Kamau, Fiction, 2003
Rinne Groff, Drama, 2005
Ilya Kaminsky, Poetry, 2005
Paul Guest, Poetry, 2007
Joan Kane, Poetry, 2009
Stephen Adly Guirgis, Drama, 2006
Seth Kantner, Fiction, 2005
Danai Gurira, Drama, 2012
Mary Karr, Poetry, 1989
Daniel Hall, Poetry, 1998
Douglas Kearney, Poetry, 2008
W. David Hancock, Drama, 1998
John Keene, Fiction, Poetry, 2005
Kent Haruf, Fiction, 1986
Brigit Pegeen Kelly, Poetry, 1996
Michael Haskell, Poetry, 1999
Randall Kenan, Fiction, Nonfiction, 1994
Ehud Havazelet, Fiction, 1999
Brad Kessler, Fiction, 2007
Terrance Hayes, Poetry, 1999
Laleh Khadivi, Fiction, 2008
Alan Heathcock, Fiction, 2012
Suji Kwock Kim, Poetry, 2006
Amy Herzog, Drama, 2011
Alice Sola Kim, Fiction, 2016
Emily Hiestand, Poetry, 1990
James Kimbrell, Poetry, 1998
Rick Hilles, Poetry, 2008
Lily King, Fiction, 2000
Lucas Hnath, Drama, 2015
Brian Kiteley, Fiction, 1996
Eva Hoffman, Nonfiction, 1992
Matthew Klam, Fiction, 2001
Donovan Hohn, Nonfiction, 2008
Kevin Kling, Drama, 1993
John Holman, Fiction, 1991
Wayne Koestenbaum, Nonfiction,
Mary Hood, Fiction, 1994
Poetry, 1994
Jay Hopler, Poetry, 2009
Tony Kushner, Drama, 1990
Michelle Huneven, Fiction, 2002
Natalie Kusz, Nonfiction, 1989
Samuel D. Hunter, Drama, 2012
Catherine Lacey, Fiction, 2016
Ishion Hutchinson, Poetry, 2013
Mary La Chapelle, Fiction, 1988
Naomi Iizuka, Drama, 1999
Rattawut Lapcharoensap, Fiction, 2010
Major Jackson, Poetry, 2003
Victor Lavalle, Fiction, 2004
Amy Leach, Nonfiction, 2010
Thylias Moss, Poetry, 1991
Li-Young Lee, Poetry, 1988
Brighde Mullins, Drama, 2001
Suzannah Lessard, Nonfiction, 1995
Nami Mun, Fiction, 2009
Dana Levin, Poetry, 2005
Manuel Muñoz, Fiction, 2008
Mark Levine, Poetry, 1993
Yannick Murphy, Fiction, 1990
Yiyun Li, Fiction, 2006
Yxta Maya Murray, Fiction, 1999
Ralph Lombreglia, Fiction,
Lawrence Naumoff, Fiction, 1990
Nonfiction, 1998
Howard Norman, Fiction, 1985
Layli Long Soldier, Poetry, 2016
Bruce Norris, Drama, 2006
Nathaniel Mackey, Fiction, Poetry, 1993
Josip Novakovich, Fiction,
Rosemary Mahoney, Nonfiction, 1994
Nonfiction, 1997
Mona Mansour, Drama, 2012
Sigrid Nunez, Fiction, 1993
Micheline A. Marcom, Fiction, 2006
Dennis Nurkse, Poetry, 1990
Ben Marcus, Fiction, 1999
Geoffrey O’Brien, Nonfiction, 1988
J. S. Marcus, Fiction, 1992
Chris Offutt, Fiction, Nonfiction, 1996
Anthony Marra, Fiction, 2012
Patrick O’Keeffe, Fiction, 2006
Dionisio D. Martínez, Poetry, 1993
Dael Orlandersmith, Drama, 2008
Nina Marie Martínez, Fiction, 2006
Daniel Orozco, Fiction, 2011
Cate Marvin, Poetry, 2007
ZZ Packer, Fiction, 1999
Shane McCrae, Poetry, 2011
Ann Pancake, Fiction, 2003
Tarell Alvin McCraney, Drama, 2007
Suzan-Lori Parks, Drama, 1992
Alice McDermott, Fiction, 1987
Elena Passarello, Nonfiction, 2015
Reginald McKnight, Fiction, 1995
Lydia Peelle, Fiction, 2010
John McManus, Fiction, 2000
Janet Peery, Fiction, 1993
James McMichael, Poetry, 1995
Kathleen Peirce, Poetry, 1993
Scott McPherson, Drama, 1991
Benjamin Percy, Fiction, 2008
Jane Mead, Poetry, 1992
Andrew X. Pham, Nonfiction, 2000
Suketu Mehta, Fiction, Nonfiction, 1997
Rowan Ricardo Phillips, Poetry, 2013
Morgan Meis, Nonfiction, 2013
Claudia Roth Pierpont, Nonfiction, 1994
Ellen Meloy, Nonfiction, 1997
Darryl Pinckney, Fiction, Nonfiction, 1986
Michael Meyer, Nonfiction, 2009
Katha Pollitt, Nonfiction, Poetry, 1992
Meg Miroshnik, Drama, 2012
Reinaldo Povod, Drama, 1987
Albert Mobilio, Fiction, Poetry, 2000
Padgett Powell, Fiction, 1986
C. E. Morgan, Fiction, 2013
Stephanie Powell Watts, Fiction, 2013
Wright Morris, Fiction, Nonfiction, 1985
Hanna Pylväinen, Fiction, 2012
Sylvia Moss, Poetry, 1988
Hugh Raffles, Nonfiction, 2009
34
Keith Reddin, Drama, 1992
James Thomas Stevens, Poetry, 2000
Spencer Reece, Poetry, 2005
Frank Stewart, Poetry, 1986
Roger Reeves, Poetry, 2015
Ruth Stone, Poetry, 1986
Sharifa Rhodes-Pitts, Nonfiction, 2012
Patricia Storace, Nonfiction, Poetry, 1996
Mark Richard, Fiction, 1990
Kelly Stuart, Drama, 2000
Atsuro Riley, Poetry, 2012
John Jeremiah Sullivan, Nonfiction, 2004
Harriet Ritvo, Nonfiction, 1990
Melanie Sumner, Fiction, 1995
José Rivera, Drama, 1992
Mary Swander, Nonfiction, Poetry, 1994
Lewis Robinson, Fiction, 2003
Margaret Talbot, Nonfiction, 1999
James Robison, Fiction, 1985
Lysley Tenorio, Fiction, 2008
Rick Rofihe, Fiction, 1991
Clifford Thompson, Nonfiction, 2013
Carlo Rotella, Nonfiction, 2007
LB Thompson, Poetry, 2010
Jess Row, Fiction, 2003
Melanie Rae Thon, Fiction, 1997
Mary Ruefle, Poetry, 1995
Christopher Tilghman, Fiction, 1990
Sarah Ruhl, Drama, 2003
Peter Trachtenberg, Nonfiction, 2007
Michael Ryan, Poetry, 1987
Vu Tran, Fiction, 2009
Russ Rymer, Nonfiction, 1995
Judy Troy, Fiction, 1996
Luc Sante, Nonfiction, 1989
Jack Turner, Nonfiction, 2007
Saïd Sayrafiezadeh, Nonfiction, 2010
Mark Turpin, Poetry, 1997
James Schuyler, Poetry, 1985
Samrat Upadhyay, Fiction, 2001
Salvatore Scibona, Fiction, 2009
Azareen Van der Vliet Oloomi,
Danzy Senna, Fiction, 2002
Fiction, 2015
Anton Shammas, Fiction,
A. J. Verdelle, Fiction, 1996
Nonfiction, 1991
William T. Vollmann, Fiction, 1988
Akhil Sharma, Fiction, 2001
Ocean Vuong, Poetry, 2016
Lisa Shea, Fiction, 1993
D. J. Waldie, Nonfiction, 1998
Julie Sheehan, Poetry, 2008
David Foster Wallace, Fiction, 1987
Mona Simpson, Fiction, 1986
Anthony Walton, Nonfiction, 1998
Safiya Sinclair, Poetry, 2016
Anne Washburn, Drama, 2015
Evan Smith, Drama, 2002
Teddy Wayne, Fiction, 2011
Tracy K. Smith, Poetry, 2005
Charles Harper Webb, Poetry, 1998
Dalia Sofer, Fiction, 2007
Kerri Webster, Poetry, 2011
Jason Sommer, Poetry, 2001
Joshua Weiner, Poetry, 2002
Elizabeth Spires, Poetry, 1996
Timberlake Wertenbaker, Drama, 1989
Jane Springer, Poetry, 2010
Kate Wheeler, Fiction, 1994
Matthew Stadler, Fiction, 1995
Colson Whitehead, Fiction, 2000
Marianne Wiggins, Fiction, 1989 Amy Wilentz, Nonfiction, 1990 Damien Wilkins, Fiction, 1992 Claude Wilkinson, Poetry, 2000 Greg Williamson, Poetry, 1998 August Wilson, Drama, 1986 Tracey Scott Wilson, Drama, 2004 Tobias Wolff, Fiction, Nonfiction, 1989 John Wray, Fiction, 2001 Austin Wright, Fiction, Nonfiction, 1985 C. D. Wright, Poetry, 1989 Franz Wright, Poetry, 1991 Stephen Wright, Fiction, 1990 Martha Zweig, Poetry, 1999
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PER MISSIO NS
Introduction copyright © 2016 by Ben Fountain Excerpt from “On Containment, Permitting Shame, Error and Guilt, Myself the Single Source” from Proxies. Copyright © 2016 by Brian Blanchfield. Forthcoming from Nightboat Books in 2016. Excerpt from “Letter from Kentucky.” Copyright © 2016 by J.D. Daniels. Published by The Paris Review in 2012. From The Correspondence, forthcoming from Farrar, Straus and Giroux in 2017. “Benihana” from TwERK. Copyright © 2016 by LaTasha N. Nevada Diggs. Published by Belladonna* in 2013. All rights reserved. Excerpt from The (curious case of the) Watson Intelligence. Copyright © 2016 by Madeleine George. Published by Samuel French in 2014. All rights reserved. Excerpt from The Residue Years by Mitchell Jackson. Copyright © 2013 by Mitchell Jackson. Published by Bloomsbury USA. Reprinted with permission. Excerpt from “We Love Deena.” Copyright © 2016 by Alice Sola Kim. Published by Strange Horizons in 2008. Excerpt from Nobody Is Ever Missing. Copyright © 2016 by Catherine Lacey. Published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux in 2014. All rights reserved. Excerpt from “H^e Sapa.” Copyright © 2016 by Layli Long Soldier. Published by The Kenyon Review in 2012. From WHEREAS, forthcoming from Graywolf Press in 2017. “Home” and “Portrait of Eve as the Anaconda” will appear in Cannibal by Safiya Sinclair and are used by permission of the University of Nebraska Press. Forthcoming fall 2016.
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“Telemachus” and “Homewrecker” from Night Sky with Exit Wounds. Copyright © 2016 by Ocean Vuong. Forthcoming from Copper Canyon Press in 2016.
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