The Eighth Deadly Sin is Queue-Jumping

Laura Stiers is a third year English major studying abroad in London this quarter. In Dispatches from London, she blogs about books, curious Anglicisms, and literary culture in one of Europe’s most literary cities. I can’t shake the feeling that I have “foreigner” tattooed somewhere prominent on my body. Riding the Tube (far superior in […]

Dispatches from London: “London Calling”

Laura Stiers is a third year English major studying abroad in London this quarter. In Dispatches from London, she blogs about books, curious Anglicisms, and literary culture in one of Europe’s most literary cities. We flew in over the Thames as the sun was rising. The effect was pretty much the opposite of Joseph Conrad’s […]

Book Review: It Is Daylight by Arda Collins (Reviewed by Andrew Chen)

It Is Daylight by Arda Collins Yale University Press, April 2009 Review by Andrew Chen This past May, Arda Collins, winner of the Yale Series of Younger Poets Prize, came to the University of Chicago as part of the Poem Present series, reading from It Is Daylight, her first collection of poems. Tall and thin, […]

Poetry: “Equation,” by Donald Illich

Keep this secret word you spray inside my bedroom. Fire, wish, comb were abandoned as too functional. This is your thesaurus with break in case of disaster glass over it. The numbered secret you kept in my textbook is so unknown mathematicians plot against you. How do you figure anything out? The equation of language […]

Poetry: “What Might Reasonably Be Called People,” Nick Lehner

Something from the comic books— yes, that’s a good beginning. We’ll start out unreal and fantastic, turning dark and graphic in time. Fantastic. Shazam, kapow. Inset—a face with tears puddling, unrealistic eyepools of sorrow, balloon filled with Father! father! or exclamations equally italicized and important. Some thing of import, so that later when blood burbles […]

Fiction: Bedtime Story by Robin Oliveira

In my half-sleep, I hear the tattling sounds of a key unlocking the front door, a tipsy stumble up the stairs, the soft hush of the bathroom door closing, and then the adolescent tell of muffled retching. I surface slowly from unconsciousness, exasperated but relieved that whatever escapade my daughter Caro has been up to […]

Poetry: “To Virginia Woolf,” by Paulette Guerin

Drifting down a long trip to the sea Silk sash swelled with all she did not write Then dips the pen’s sharp silver beads In ink pools, oily spills, across veinless leaves, Each pocket of rocks holding tight Drifting down a long trip to the sea. She chose the tides, a moon guide, not to […]

Poetry: “Leaves in the Moon,” by C.L. O’Dell

Light unfolds itself in the dark of your veins, in the deserted cold of midnight when my eyelids jig for fish, where skin separates the fragile seasons. I am asleep, curled-up with the spiders and a strange scent of mold. You’re a wet leaf hanging in the thin belly of the moon; I reach for […]

Fiction: “Prometheus” by James Henschen

“I don’t want to know what it was ‘like’, I want to know what it was.” When the detective with the crooked jaw and prom king blue eyes says this to me, I want to punch him in the throat. Apparently, he lacks an appreciation for metaphor because what I said was “it was like […]

Author Spotlight: Shaun Tan

Picture Books For Adults: The Whimsical Art of Shaun Tan Tales from Outer Suburbia Arthur A. Levine Books, Hardcover, 96 pp. February 1, 2009 Today’s graphic novels are striving to prove to literati that they aren’t just kids’ stuff. By tackling adult themes and employing sophisticated art styles, writers and artists like Neil Gaiman and […]