The Correspondent

The Correspondent

Gilbert’s dying. It became the whole thing. You, Bruce and Fiona, my brother, our friends, my work, the house, our life, all of that was sitting on the sidelines, but I was in the ring wrestling, bloody, half-dead, with Gill’s death. Parenting the other two, trying to...
Otherwise Known as the Human Condition

Otherwise Known as the Human Condition

One of the most moving photographs I know is also one of the dullest: an empty, uninteresting-looking room with a brown carpet and beige walls. It comes at the end of Joel Sternfeld’s book On This Site (1996). On each of the previous recto pages is a color photo of an...
A Girl Is A Half-Formed Thing

A Girl Is A Half-Formed Thing

For you. You’ll soon. You’ll give her name. In the stitches of her skin she’ll wear your say. Mammy me? Yes you. Bounce the bed, I’d say. I’d say that’s what you did. Then lay you down. They cut you round. Wait and hour and day. Walking up corridors up the stairs. Are...
Limbo

Limbo

The Death Of LullyTowards evening they received a visit from the captain. He was a large, handsome man, with gold earrings glinting from among a bush of black hair. “Divine Providence,” he remarked sententiously, after the usual courtesies had passed,...