I am out in the snowy woods,
trying to find a signal
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'the trees / are slender in the way that things / are almost, though not quite / absent'
I am out in the snowy woods,
trying to find a signal
Sign in to Granta.com.
‘We meet at various points in the great swathes of the past that neither of us were alive to witness.’
Allen Bratton on a daytrip to a castle with his older boyfriend.
‘Listening to three white poets, whom I suspect are academics, talk about the state of poetry.’
Oluwaseun Olayiwola eavesdrops on an older generation.
‘I’d been dubious about his company at first.’
Sarah Moss on watching Shakespeare with her twelve-year-old son.
‘She didn’t trust us because, to her, tenants were like children.’
Kate Zambreno on negotiating with her older landlady.
‘A moment now swallowed in embarrassment, I asked a question only a young person might ask an older one.’
Lynne Tillman on trying to understand what makes a generation.
John Burnside lives in East Fife, Scotland, where he teaches at the University of St. Andrews. His fifth novel, The Devil’s Footprints, and a collection of poems, Gift Songs, were published by Jonathan Cape in spring 2007.
More about the author →‘I was marking a stack of essays / on Frank O’Hara / and each had a Wiki- / paragraph to say / who Genet was.’
‘Shoeboxes lined with eggs and empty / pomegranates drying in a bowl, / mousebones and wicker, chess pieces, muddled coats.’
‘Marx said the forest only echoes back what you shout into it – and this is very often true, perhaps more often than not, but I think the poet’s task is to suggest that it needn’t be.’
‘I think of betrayal as a crack in the veneer of humanity, an act that reveals to us, and others, our base animal nature.’
Home is makeshift. Everything we build, everything we name, everything we hold dear and would not have taken from us is temporary and in constant need of re-imagining.
‘The new law was technical and complicated, but created something genuinely new: the international business company, a hyper-deregulated shell corporation.’
Oliver Bullough investigates the history of shell companies in the British Virgin Islands.
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