'The next dawn broke over an immense stony plain where billions of blue, pink and white plastic bags bobbed like so many tethered pearly balloons.'
When I sent off my cheque for two berths on ‘A Railway Cruise along the Silk Route . . . aboard Mao’s State Train richly endowed with walnut panelling and brass fittings’, I hadn’t actually grasped the fact that if you travel from Samarkand to Shanghai, you spend most of your time in China. …
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‘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.
‘For a feminist like me who considers that the combination of dazzle with drudgery is one of the most insidious ways in which women in our society are subject to stress, the multiplication of contradictory demands upon the Cuban women is a cause for concern.’
‘All I wanted was to look at Xu and be looked at by Xu. Be touched by Xu. Be commanded by Xu.’
An extract from Blue Hunger by Viola Di Grado, translated by Jamie Richards.
‘At the silk museum, / the silkworms crumpled themselves in baskets, / lazy and dazed in the spoils of mulberry.’
A poem by Sally Wen Mao.
‘I only stopped playing with him when he began biting the fingers of anyone who tried to pet him.’
