A Publication of Rowan University's 
Master of Arts in Writing Graduate Program 

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ISSUE EXCERPTS

Thomas Lynch
from BBC Radio 4

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Sex and the dead, Yeats wrote in a letter to Olivia Shakespeare, are the only subjects of interest to the studious mind. No doubt he was trying to chat her up. All the same, there’s some truth to his take on it. How handy for me, I remember thinking. I was fond of sex; the dead were everywhere.
    Here I am, now forty some years since, still vexed by both. However good the sex is or the death, neither is ever quite good enough. Let the perfect here be the enemy of the good. Our inexorable pursuits and dodges define and divide our life and times.

Alex Forman
from "WILSON, 28th, 1913–21"
from Tall, Slim & Erect: Portraits of the Presidents

 

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Woodrow Wilson
Thomas Woodrow Wilson had iron-gray hair, a determined thrust of jaw, and slate-blue eyes behind glittering, rimless glasses. His face was out of proportion, there was too much below the eyeglasses, too little above. He had a beaked nose, protuberant ears, and a loose, meaty upper lip. His ugliness obsessed him.
     He never smoked, but decay had mottled his teeth, so that when he smiled, patches of yellow, brown, and blue with glints of gold were exhibited. On his face was a habitual astringency, but he could suddenly confront a person or a camera with a momentary expression of lover-like understanding and affection.

Listen: Entire Woodrow Wilson Entry



Christopher Howell
"Memory's House"

The back door bangs
against the house.
Jagged light from what
were windows leaks onto
chewed up chairs and curtains.
Whatever’s nesting in the corners
should probably be left alone.
Go ahead and be the telephone
ringing somewhere out of reach.
Who would answer
cannot be a friend and anyway
the damp cellar wonders
who would call, who would
climb the stair of missing steps
and pace the hall, enter that door
where all the lights are out
and the moon
is a mess on the floor.

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