August Kleinzahler’s collections include Green Sees Things in Waves; The Strange Hours Travellers Keep, which won the Griffin Poetry Prize; Sleeping It Off in Rapid City, which won the National Book Critics Circle Award; The Hotel Oneira and Snow Approaching on the Hudson. His memoir of his childhood in New Jersey, Cutty, One Rock, came out in 2005. Much of it first appeared in the LRB, as did many of the pieces included in Sallies, Romps, Portraits and Send-Offs: Selected Prose 2000-2016.
The river craft moves slowly upriver in the heart of Terra Magellanica,this forest land of earthquakes, hurricanes and volcanic eruptions,sitting low in the mud-coloured water, laden with its cargoof appoggiaturas, mordents, sarabandes, gavottes and trills,along with Domenico Zipoli in his black cassock, lately of Rome, Florence, Bolognaand Naples, scene of his famous contretemps with...
It was a fortnight before le couple coiffure turned up for the high season.A small flat her tante in Paris owned and let to the couple every year,and for many years. They were not young. Mlle’s discomfort was evidentfrom the moment they stepped off the bus that night, as if she found himunworthy somehow of such a gift as a free flat in St Tropez, or her, or both,or perhaps a general...
‘We’re fucked,’ my wife said, ‘truly and utterly fucked. None of these clowns can beat Trump.’ It had been a hideous 36 hours: the Iowa caucuses were a debacle, Trump – Père Ubu brought to life – had been acquitted by the Senate of impeachable crimes, delivered a rousing, if thoroughly counterfactual, State of the Union address, and...
Windshield wipers slapping back and forth, Murph’s Celebrity SedanHugged the curve as it sped onto the Edison Bridge, Super 88 four barrelHigh Compression 394 Rocket V8, Roto Hydro-matic transmission, Power Steering,Pedal-eeze Power Brakes, the rolling black cylinder speedometerFlashing green, yellow and red, holding steady at 65 mph, midnight blue frameEncasing me in terror, where I...
In 1882, the year Virginia Woolf and William Carlos Williams were born, Friedrich Nietzsche bought a typewriter, a Malling-Hansen Writing Ball. It wasn’t as good as a Remington but it was cheaper. Nietzsche was losing his eyesight, probably as a result of syphilis, and hoped the Writing Ball would help. But first he had to master touch-typing. He soon gave up on the experiment. But...
The poems in Live from the Hong Kong Nile Club are taken from August Kleinzahler’s first six publications. All were small press books with relatively limited circulations – the first,...
In a power-rhyming slap-happy parody of Thirties doom-mongering published in 1938 William Empson famously had ‘Just a Smack at Auden’: What was said by Marx, boys, what did he...
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