The Hudson Review

The stone was one of the large river stones
Mark collected in the Japanese tradition
of suiseki. Picture him in denim overalls,
a red bandana tied around his bald head,
his pant legs wet up to the knees, lumbering
among the boulders near the river’s edge,

My mother slips out of her skin
to travel the hospital’s halls.

She’s abandoned her body
for a respite from monitors

and the blessed nurses she swats
with a gloved hand. She stretches:

like a milky hatchling under
warm-orange dawn. Then confides

she doesn’t want to live ...

July 3, 2018 Our first full day in Lisbon. This morning I took a long, joyful walk from the Avenida da República to the Cais do Sodré. I go into the city like a swimmer entering the water. On the blank page of a notebook, I wrote this almost without thinking:

At some point, Medina realized he was lost. He wanted to turn back, but it was no...

In a poem called “Here and There,” collected in The Stars of Earth, her volume of new and selected poems published in 2017, Emily Grosholz asked, “What will I miss when I’m gone?” The question is still being asked, though Emily died May 2nd at age 75. I can hear the genuine curiosity in her voice, the guiding intelligence of real inquiry. She was a traveler in mind a...

Dear H,

A friend who is a literary critic at a New York newspaper sought information related to an article he was writing about the state of book reviewing. At one point in the piece, he said, he wished to compare the situation in the US book world (it seems appropriate here to invoke the recent closure of the Washington Post’s free-standing review s...