August Kleinzahler

In June​ 2002, Tom Pickard moved into a cramped attic in the Hartside Café in Cumbria, perched on Fiends Fell, six miles from Alston, where Pickard had been living. The café sits at the high point of the road between Penrith and Alston, one of the few trans-Pennine roads. At just below two thousand feet it was the highest café in England, and felt like the windiest. The...

I find​ this image ravishing, as others might find a Vermeer or Velázquez, although it’s only a cheap copy of a 1972 platinum print, Esso Station and Tenement House, Hoboken, New Jersey (the photograph can be seen in George Tice: A Celebration, at the Nailya Alexander Gallery in New York until 13 October). In the foreground is an Esso gas station, a Ford Fairlane parked...

– Lamb Posse is what tops the bill this a.m., Sheriff,Plus your shot of choice, plus a slice of pie, pecan or rhubarb, you pick.– I’ll skip the pie, thank ye, and have a beer back instead o’.– Don’t know that I can swing that, bud.– Swing it, brother, swing, you dozy cull, Slapping down my sidearm on the counter, loudie-like, to make a point. A head...

One night​ in 1939, 16-year-old Sam Phillips jumped into a ‘big old Dodge’ with his older brother and a few friends a little after midnight and set out to drive from Florence, Alabama to Dallas, Texas to hear a celebrated First Baptist pastor deliver a sermon. At four or five a.m. the boys arrived in Memphis, where they found themselves in a black part of town called Beale...

It was just a block or two off Palisade Ave, a sprawling, second-floor living room, faux wood-panelled, stuffed chairs, big sofa, cheap ceramic Disney figurines on the coffee table, but with a wall-sized picture window facing east, the midtown ‘moody, water-loving giants of Manhattan’ nearly in our laps, a 3-D mirage, a Fata Morgana of the sort you see sometimes on Rt. 46 headed...