Thick roots tumble across a dilapidated house, the snake-like trunks of a banyan tree framing where the front door once stood. Its walls have been hollowed by decades of typhoons, monsoons and summer humidity, now little more than loose, moss-covered stones and mortar dust. Vines tease through cracks in the foundations and fallen leaves litter the rotten floorboards.
This scene wouldn’t look out of place deep in the Malaysian rainforest or the verdant foothills of India. But photographer Stefan Irvine snapped these pictures just a stone’s throw from one of the most densely populated cities in the world, a global metropolis of steely skyscrapers and gridlocked traffic.
Glantz stared at the dregs pooling at the bottom of the wine bottle beside her.
She typed out an ad on Craigslist: “Professional bridesmaid – w4w – 26 (NYC). Let me be there for you, this time, if: you don’t have any other girlfriends except your third cousin, twice removed, who is often found sticking her tongue down an empty bottle of red wine,” she wrote. “You need someone to take control and make sure bridesmaid #4 buys her dress on time and doesn’t show up 3 hours late.”
And then she went to bed.
Hewitt’s poetry is a hide and seek of the self. It reveals and conceals. In some of his best poems, nature offers the means of disguise, raided like a dressing-up box. In an untitled poem, he writes about the night: “And I, androgyne of the garden, raise my arms for the gown night holds above me, let fall over my cool skin and slink from the field through the brush, at dusk.” In another untitled poem, he pictures how it might be to “step naked inside/the original night blue dress/its torso of silk…” In Immram, he remembers bathing in silver waters: “Even my skin/sang in its cold dress.”
Taken as a whole, “Lede” paints a portrait of a disappearing journalistic world — of newspapers, mostly, but also of magazines. It contains not a whiff of sentimentality; Trillin is too clear-eyed for that. But readers might feel bereft, noting how much has changed in the 60 years since he started writing, how diminished newspapers have become, how robust newspaper wars once were, how many larger-than-life writers have died or moved on. In short, how things used to be in the trade.
Ultimately, though, this is a sensitively written and generous piece of work. Vera-Gray’s lack of judgement shines from her prose and from her approach to her interview subjects, allowing women no longer to be simply the passive product in the conversation around porn.