Ange Mlinko

When​ Harry Mathews died in Key West in 2017, just shy of his 87th birthday, he was remembered as the first American member of Oulipo, the expatriate author of several experimental novels: The Conversions (1962), Tlooth (1966), The Sinking of the Odradek Stadium (1975), Cigarettes (1987), The Journalist (1994) and My Life in CIA (2005). A final novel, The Solitary Twin, was published...

If you’re a poet, and also a philosopher of language who dotes on the real-world consequence of words, it comes as a shock that words have no bearing, finally, on death. ‘That you can’t edit.’ The great licentiousness of language lies in its counterfactuals: that is its source of invention, in play as well as villainy, but therein also lies Riley’s problem: she can be told her son is dead, she can say it to herself a hundred ways, but words are just that. It’s only with the continuation of his non-return that the fact sinks in.

Swamp cypress candled itself above the waterwhere Nereus’ daughterID’d carnivorous-looking white bloomsand erect scarlet racemesexciting an admiral, plus somesmall yellow species, all sulphur and helium.

She even thought she saw a hummingbirdfeasting on the bells of bright red –less a creaturethan a miniaturetourbillon tweezing a gap in the humdrumspace-time continuum.

My mother, in 1966, is an accessoryatop a Revolutionary War cannon:leopard print coat, buttons undone,legs slimly pressed, bare knees closed –a scene both faded and overexposed.She wasn’t used to winter; vis à visher status as ‘permanent resident alien’,she should have covered up. Pennsylvania …Her brother already drafted in the army.The very picture of a...

One wag​ subtitled it ‘Homer in a Nutshell’. The Batrachomyomachia, or The Battle between the Frogs and the Mice, was thought by the Romans and its early English translators to be a minor work of Homer’s from the eighth or ninth century BC, though its linguistic anachronisms and allusion to Callimachus place it as a likely Hellenistic epyllion. Its three hundred lines in...