Summary:

Aurelio Escovar is introduced as a poor dentist without a degree. He is busy polishing false teeth early one morning when the mayor arrives to see him. At first he refuses to see this would-be patient, until the mayor, who has been suffering severe toothache for five days and is desperate, threatens to shoot him. Eventually the dentist lets him in, examines him, and then removes the infected wisdom tooth, without anesthesia.

We realize that the dentist has deliberately made the mayor suffer all this time, and he gives the reason as he pulls out the tooth, saying "Now you’ll pay for our twenty dead men." When the mayor has recovered and wiped his tears, he leaves, telling the dentist to send the bill. When Escovar asks whether to send the bill "To you or the town?," the mayor replies, "It’s the same damn thing."

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Anne Lamott, a writer, recovered alcoholic, former addict and impassioned Republican-hater, finds herself pregnant in her mid-thirties, and decides to have the baby. This journal is a chronicle of her son Sam’s first year. She is fiercely self-deprecatory and funny and unafraid to talk about the dark side of parenting an infant: the fear, exhaustion, anger, emotional swings; that 4 a.m. inability to cope with the crying neediness of the baby.

She is a single parent barely able to pay the bills, but she has a tremendous support network of family, friends, and the people of her church--all of whom clearly love Sam and love her. And then, when Sam is 7 months old, crawling "like a Komodo dragon," the author’s best friend Pammy is diagnosed with metastatic breast cancer. The author, who discovers the depth and resonance of love because of the gift of Sam, must now learn loss. She questions her faith, which she cannot justify on a cerebral level, but still hopes that God loves and guides her the way a parent loves and guides a child.

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Summary:

The old sit "on the porch in rockers / Letting the faded light / Of afternoon carry them off." The narrator visualizes them mulling over the past as they rock back and forth. Although the old people cover "ground / They did not know was there," they learn nothing new in this. They receive no redemptive message, not even "a reason / To make it seem worthwhile." In fact, evening comes and soon it will be time for them to go to their solitary beds and fall into the "sheepless / Pastures of a long sleep."

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Summary:

Amelia Stern is an academic pediatrician in a large city hospital and mother of a bright, young son. She is deeply involved with her patients, including Darren, born with AIDS, and Sara, the malnourished child of anxious parents, both lawyers. As she struggles to answer to the demands of her work for "other women’s children," she neglects her own child and her marriage begins to fall apart. Her husband’s resentment and her own feelings of guilt come to a crisis when her son falls seriously ill while she is at the hospital.

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Summary:

Matvey Terekhov lives with his cousin Yakov, who runs an inn. Matvey was once extremely religious and ascetic, but now has left asceticism behind. Yakov, on the other hand, is obsessively religious. At one point Matvey initiates an argument with Yakov about a religious issue. Yakov is overcome with anger and Aglaya, Yakov’s wife, hits Matvey over the head with a bottle, and kills him. Husband and wife are sent to prison in Siberia. While Yakov loses his faith after the murder, he regains it in prison.

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The speaker is a boy away at school when the news comes that his four year old brother has been killed in an accident. Arriving home, "I met my father crying . . . " The boy is "embarrassed / By old men standing up to shake my hand / And tell me they were ’sorry for my trouble.’" The next morning the boy goes upstairs to see his brother lying "in the four foot box as in his cot." [22 lines]

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Summary:

An Australian man has recently been diagnosed as having a fatal disease. He decides to take a quixotic trip to Europe, an open-ended adventure to unplanned destinations. This novel takes the form of 20 long and extraordinarily articulate letters written from Venice to an anonymous correspondent in Melbourne.

The letters work on three levels. First, they describe the writer’s travels from Locarno to Vicenza to Padua, stages of his journey prior to arriving in Venice. In fact, the book is divided into groups of letters, each of them dealing with one of the three cities and followed by a set of notes that illuminate some of the writer’s literary and historical allusions.

Second, the letters describe the writer’s current activities in Venice and especially his reflections on human nature and mortality. Finally, he refers back to events that occurred in Melbourne immediately preceding his journey. The most important of these events are the consultations with his doctor and, to a lesser extent, the reaction of Peter, his lover, to the lethal diagnosis.

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Summary:

The unrequited love of the narrator is compared to a devastating fever. Reason, "the physician," is ignored and cannot abate the disease. Without reason, madness (fever) reigns; and the poet renounces his beloved as "black as hell, as dark as night."

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Summary:

A lieutenant named Alexander Grigoryvitch Sokolsky arrives at the home of Susanna Moiseyevna Rothstein, a Jewess and owner of a vodka distillery. Sokolsky has come to collect the 2300 rubles that Rothstein owes his married cousin. In fact, his cousin doesn’t actually need the money, but Sokolsky is helping his cousin get his debts paid so that he can then borrow the 5000 rubles that he needs to marry his fiancée.

Susanna, a luscious, free-spirited young woman, receives the lieutenant and offers him supper. She entices the IOUs from him, but then refuses to pay up. The next morning Sokolsky returns to his cousin’s house without the money, but presumably sexually satisfied. Kryukov, the cousin, rants and raves. What an outrage! He determines to visit the Jewess himself and demand payment. He does so and, likewise, only returns the next morning, penniless.

After a week, Sokolsky borrows the money from his cousin and leaves. After another week, Kryukov gets an uncontrollable itch to visit the Jewess again. When he arrives at her mansion, there are many men around, including Sokolsky, who evidently has hung around Susanna’s house for a week, having completely forgotten about his fiancée. Krykov’s final words are: "How can I judge him since I’m here myself?"

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Summary:

Swenson’s poems about the body and death express the essential mystery of human experience and of observing the cycles of the natural world. In "Question" she wonders in metaphor about what will become of the Self after death, "when Body my good / bright dog is dead." In "Death, Great Smoothener" Swenson notices the odd roles that the personified death seems to play. In "Feel Me" the poet ponders the curious last words of her dying father, suspecting a considerable indictment of the living by the dying. In "Death Invited" she details the gruesome ending of a bullfight, with death personified by the bull, dragged from the ring only to be replaced by another: "Here comes trotting, snorting death / let loose again."

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