It all started with my balls. I was in Southern California and my right ball was slightly sore. At the beginning I thought the pain might be caused by the heavy keys in the right hand pocket of my trousers banging against my testicle as I walked along the street. So I moved the keys into my jacket pocket. The pain stayed for a while and then it went away and then it came back. I was doing readings every day, selling my melancholy stories to the people of Orange County and places south. I wondered, some days, if there might be a doctor in the audience who, if I made a suitable announcement at the end of the reading, could make this pain in my right testicle go away. But I didn’t want to make a fuss.
When the readings were done, I went to LA and ignored my balls. Then I went to London and looked them up on the internet. It was clear what I had. The right testicle was painful but not swollen. But the veins around it had decided to swell up a bit. The internet made clear what this condition was called.
My son was born twice: first on a warm, late June afternoon in a busy east London hospital, and again five years later at a small children’s nursing home in Queens, New York.
I was six-and-a-half months pregnant when I was diagnosed with pre-eclampsia. On the day it happened, I had done a series of unremarkable things: shopping for bread, editing a story, calling my parents in Bangladesh. In the afternoon, my midwife came over for a routine visit. She checked my blood pressure and saw that it was high, so she asked me to pee on a stick. When I returned it to her, she told me to pack a bag.
It took us 10 minutes to get to Homerton hospital, where the slightly harried doctor on duty told me that the only cure for pre-eclampsia was delivery. I had trouble understanding how delivering a baby 10 weeks early could be classified as a cure, but I was not given time to argue. They prepped me for surgery, a needle in my back, compression socks on my feet. I lay down on the operating table and my husband cradled my head in his arms. I felt no pain, only pulling and tilting and rocking, as if someone had tied me down and set me afloat. Then, a silence I could have sworn lasted hours, but must have only been a few minutes, after which I heard a soft cry. A nurse gave me a brief glimpse of my son’s swaddled form before whisking him away to the neonatal intensive care unit. I didn’t know then that I wouldn’t see him again for three days, that he would be in the hospital for two months, and that, once released, he would refuse to eat for five years.
“Everybody thinks basically that the method you learn in school is the best one, but in fact it’s an active area of research,” said Joris van der Hoeven, a mathematician at the French National Center for Scientific Research and one of the co-authors.
The complexity of many computational problems, from calculating new digits of pi to finding large prime numbers, boils down to the speed of multiplication. Van der Hoeven describes their result as setting a kind of mathematical speed limit for how fast many other kinds of problems can be solved.
The most striking thing about Caroline Knox’s latest poetry collection, Hear Trains, is the way it savors and explores the nuances of language. Composed in a way that is reminiscent of eighteenth-century commonplace books, where information, quotations, and random facts were stored for the writer to revisit later, Hear Trains invites readers into a love affair with words. In the title poem, the speaker leads readers through the complexities involved in the word sault: “So sault means ‘jump,’ as in / sauter in France, but not / in New France! In Old France / the l dropped out.”
That’s the ultimate charm of Working: it’s a reminder that we should care less about whether or not the work gets finished, and more for everything Caro has given us so far.
The dragonflies hatched last night,
twin-winged ghosts in porchlight
still world-wet and spinning,
unsure whether to chase the bulb