Say I am sitting with my mother and grandmother at the square kitchen table patterned over by vinyl-cloth apples, having just eaten lunch. Our elbows crowd the breadbasket, in which remains one solid slice and one pockmarked. My pointer finger corrals the crumbs. My mother stares at her elbow, where...

Four writers consider the X-ray on its 130th birthday.

By some oversight there are still mostly fields between Bologna and Venice, intimately familiar to me after the eight years I spent translating Italian sonnets about farm implements and irrigation troughs by a guy improbably celebrated as the founder of modern Italian poetry. From the train, vast le...

A letter, handwritten. Dated 10/3/94 in the righthand corner. Written in all caps. Like I’m shouting at her. HI MOM! IT’S YOUR FAVORITE SON HERE. GUESS WHERE I AM AS I’M WRITING THIS? COME ON, GUESS! You don’t have to guess. I will tell you. I was on campus.

I was almost two, and it was altogether a more innocent time, when my family immigrated from Kyiv to Chicago. Reagan was the president-elect, and Disco Demolition Night in Comiskey Park only a few months in the rearview. In those days, my babblings came out in Russian...

I read Seamus Heaney’s North as a university student in 1997. At the time, there had been a number of failed ceasefires between the republican and loyalist paramilitaries in Northern Ireland, and the Good Friday agreement was not yet in sight. In North, Heaney finds a way through sectarian violence in a stunning series of poems centered on Northern Europe’s bog bodies...