The Memory Palace by Mira Bartok
The Memory Palace by Mira Bartok New York Times and Globe and Mail best-selling book The Memory Palace by Mira Bartok is a breathtaking literary memoir about the complex meaning of love, truth, and the capacity for forgiveness among family. Through stunning prose and original art created by the author in tandem with the text, The Memory Palace explores the connections between mother and daughter that cannot be broken no matter how...
Eloise Klein Healy, 2011 To the Lighthouse Finalist Judge
The 2011 To the Lighthouse finalist judge is Eloise Klein Healy, the first Los Angeles Poet Laureate. Post Update: Click here to see Eloise’s selected winner, Jessica Piazza.
“Quick and Clever,” by Allison Alsup
Sing little bluebird Fly round and round I am eight and reading out loud to my mother, showing off the English I have learned in school. I am the third or fourth best reader. Soon I will be first. My mother pulls a needle, ties a knot and clips the thread. She is mending. Her basket is full as it is every New Year and fall, when the men return from the fields, from Castroville, Fresno, Stockton. She sews busted collars, broken frog...
“Buoys,” by CJ Hauser
I have two lobsters in my bathtub and I’m not sure I can kill them. New England will know if I don’t. Henry is from Maine, which I found charming, until we moved here post-honeymoon. I am sitting on the rim of my bathtub. It has curled, porcelain feet with flaky rust between the toes. Everything is anthropomorphized in this house- that’s my first problem. My second problem is that I pet the lobsters. I roll up a sleeve and run my...
“A Redhead Brunette and Blonde: My Muse was a Bird,” by Jennifer Ruden
The first one to quit writing had fiery red hair and a penchant for dark haired men (and women) who lacked formal education. Once, while we were in graduate school, we woke up in the same bed. “Now this doesn’t worry me,” she had said. “But he does.” She motioned to a young man crashed on the sofa: jeans around his ankles, tender white boxers dangerously close. “Do you know who that is?” I did not. The redhead wrote poems about...