I believe that each of us is given one sentence at birth, and we spend the rest of our life trying to read that sentence and make sense of it.
—
Li Young Lee
Two Poems by Tom Healy
- Olafur Eliasson by Chris Gilbert
- Ellen Phelan by Michèle Gerber Klein
- Percival Everett by Rone Shavers
- Francisco Goldman by Esther Allen
- Ben Katchor by Alexander Theroux
- Jørgen Leth by Anne Mette Lundtofte
- Michael Bell by Andrew Benjamin
- Mauricio Kagel by Anthony Coleman
interviews
- Port Mungo by Patrick McGrath
- Three Stories by Diane Williams
- Collusions by Beth Helms
- Desire by Lindsay Ahl
- Hate by Dylan Landis
- Four Poems by Matthew Zapruder
- Poem Written From November 30 to March 27 by Juliana Spahr
- Two Poems by Tom Healy
First Proof
- Doug & Mike Starn by Tom Healy
- Hernan Bas by Roberto Juarez
- Kathleen Gilje by Mary Ellen Mark
- Banks Violette by Sue de Beer
Artists On Artists
- Dieter Roth: Roth Time by Marjorie Welish
- Helga Von Eicken by Cynthia Eardley
- The War in Iraq, International Center for Photography by Lucy Raven
- Geoffrey Batchen’s Forget Me Not: Photography and Remembrance by Nell McClister
- Ann Hood’s An Ornithologist’s Guide to Life, Julie Orringer’s How to Breathe Underwater, Michael Redhill’s Fidelity, Joan Silber’s Ideas of Heaven: A Ring of Stories by Mary Morris
- Matthea Harvey’s Sad Little Breathing Machine by Matthew Zapruder
- Benjamin Hollander’s Rituals of Truth and the Other Israeli by Ammiel Alcalay
- Glen E. Friedman, The Idealist: In My Eyes—25 years by J.Y Lym
- Jehane Noujaim’s Control Room by Bette Gordon
- Highly Bred & Sweetly Tempered by Climax Golden Twins by Fionn Meade
- Fiery Furnaces’s Blueberry Boat by Peter Margasak
Editor's Choice
Rituals of Marriage
I.
Unlike mint, you don’t
stay on the tongue.
More like water,
rain that needs salt.
What haunts the mouth
is not rage’s sugar
dissolving, but the taste
of us evaporating.
II.
Someone has toyed
with the history.
Was it you?
Events rearranged,
my good dolls broken.
Who took liberties,
sat in the chair,
decided not to eat?
Who left warmth
in these sheets?
Everything here
was to stay cold.
Suburban Life
A table of spiders
passing business cards,
cursing wind
and upended brooms,
stories of bad business.
The fat one in the corner
tries to keep them all
laughing, spinning
exaggerations,
making fun of prey.
—Tom Healy is the chair of Creative Time and president of Fence magazine. His poems and criticism have appeared in Salmagundi, the Yale Review, the Paris Review, and other literary journals and anthologies. He is a new contributing editor at BOMB.
Originally published in
BOMB 88,
Summer 2004
Featuring interviews with Olafur Eliasson, Ellen Phelan, Percival Everett, Francisco Goldman and Esther Allen, Ben Katchor and Alexaner Theroux, Jorgen Leth and Ann Mette Lundtofte, Michael Bell, and Mauricio Kagel.
