Quarternote Chapbook

A Pulitzer Prize-winning author details an unconsummated love affair that sustains political, philosophical, and sexual interest over a lifetime. The truth is always different from what anyone says out loud, but who really cares? Not I, said the man I chose to be, nor I nor I nor I-among the many of us she left teetering. Stephen Dunn is a Pulitzer Prize winner and the author of seventeen collections of poetry, most recently Lines of Defense, Here and Now, and What Goes On: Selected & New Poems: 1995-2009. He teaches at Richard Stockton College of New Jersey.

The poems in Night Animals, by Yusef Komunyakaa, climb so deeply into the being of various beasts, from cricket to leopard to snowy owl, that we read them with an uncanny shiver of recognition. Without ever fully abandoning his human skin, Komunyakaa inhabits both the outer and inner lives of these creatures. The images are a brilliant match for the poems, each of Rachel Bliss's surreal animals populate a realm somewhere between our two species-birds with teeth, men with antlers, a duck wearing suspenders. Both image and word are dense and dark, intensely focused around a kind of hunger. The poet has been startling us with his rich, disturbing, and important poems for many years. Night Animals extends Yusef Komunyakaa's remarkable oeuvre.

Since Heather McHugh first began publishing her poems in 1968, poetry readers have marveled at the immensity and range of her gift. There seems to be nothing that McHugh can't do with words and do with high wit and sonic brilliance. In her chapbook Feeler, McHugh takes on the fraught subject of empathy-how much we feel, and do, for the afflicted. It also addresses the relation between thought and feeling: "Nowadays I cannot tell/ the two apart: can't feel things thoughtlessly/or think things up without emotion." As with only the very best poets, McHugh seamlessly combines thought and feeling, in poems that are entertaining and profound.

Sandra Cisneros has a fondness for animals and this little gem of a story makes that abundantly clear. "La casa azul," the cobalt blue residence of Mister and Missus Rivera, overflows with hairless dogs, monkeys, a fawn, a "passionate" Guacamaya macaw, tarantulas, an iguana, and rescues that resemble "ancient Olmec pottery." Missus loves the rescues most "because their eyes were filled with grief." She takes lavish care of her husband too, a famous artist, though her neighbors insist he has eyes for other women: "He's spoiled." "He's a fat toad." She cannot reject him. "...because love is like that. No matter how much it bites, we enjoy and admire the scars." Thus, the generous creatures pawing her belly, sleeping on her pillow, and "kneeling outside her door like the adoring Magi before the just-born Christ." This beautiful chapbook is bi-lingual and contains several illustrations-line drawings by Cisneros herself.

"It is impossible for me to write about the imagination; it is like asking a fish to describe the sea," Mary Ruefle announces at the start of her essay. With wit and intellectual abandon, Ruefle draws inspiration from Wittgenstein, Shakespeare, Jesus, Steve Jobs, Johnny Cash, and Emily Dickson to explore her subject. The chapbook features original interior illustrations. Mary Ruefle is the author of numerous volumes of poetry and prose, including Madness, Rack, and Honey: Collected Lectures, a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award in Criticism, and Selected Poems, winner of the William Carlos Williams Award from the Poetry Society of America.

"On the bridges to those slippery worlds, we are wrapped in gold foil, disease free. Who is saving whom? The question's not stated, only implied." In 2013, the Italian government implemented Mare Nostrum, an operation intended to limit immigration from Africa and the Middle East to European countries. For the refugees, the journeys were harrowing, often ending in shipwrecks or imprisonment, and the arrivals were wracked with uncertainty. Here, the poet Khaled Mattawa conjures a pointed, incantatory account of the refugee experience in the Mediterranean. In reclaiming the operation's name Mare Nostrum (our sea in Latin), he renders us culpable for the losses, and responsible to those risking their lives in pursuit of hope and respite from oppression. The voices are many, and the lyrics ritualistic, as if Mattawa has stirred ghosts from the wreckage. Part narrative, part blessing, this chapbook begs of its readers: Do you remember? Mattawa's writing is a lighthouse for politics of the twenty-first century, and this chapbook a stunning memorial.

In Brood, Kimiko Hahn trains her eye on the commonplace-clothespins, bees, papaya, perfume, poached eggs, a sponge, fire, sand dollars-and reveals their very essence in concise evocative language. Underlying these little gems is a sense of loss, a mother's death or a longing for childhood. "Brood" connotes the bundling of family or beasts, but also dark thinking, and both are at play here where the less said, the better. Kimiko Hahn is the author of ten books of poetry, including most recently, Brain Fever (Norton, 2014). She has received numerous honors, including the PSA's Shelley Memorial Prize, the PEN/Voelcker Award, and fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, Guggenheim Foundation, and New York Foundation for the Arts. She is a distinguished professor in creative writing at Queens College (CUNY) and lives in Forest Hills, New York.