Now this is a city held by winter,
and this is a glass splinter.
Now this is a day as short as a short vowel,
and this is a night as long as a wandering owl.
Now this is how brilliance fails,
and this is the sun wearing hundreds and hundreds of veils.
Now this is a road scratched in a black window,
and this is what men and women do.
Now this is a black dress in a storm,
and this is a table spilling with charm.
Now this is the lip of a moment,
and this is what they both partly wanted.
Now this is a door made of pages,
and these are the large eyes of your rages.
Aisha Sabatini Sloan
Episode 22: “Form and Formlessness”
In an essay specially commissioned for the podcast, Aisha Sabatini Sloan describes rambling around Paris with her father, Lester Sloan, a longtime staff photographer for Newsweek, and a glamorous woman who befriends them. In an excerpt from The Art of Fiction no. 246, Rachel Cusk and Sheila Heti discuss how writing her first novel helped Cusk discover her “shape or identity or essence.” Next, Allan Gurganus’s reading of his story “It Had Wings,” about an arthritic woman who finds a fallen angel in her backyard, is interspersed with a version of the story rendered as a one-woman opera by the composer Bruce Saylor. The episode closes with “Dear Someone,” a poem by Deborah Landau.
Rachel Cusk photo courtesy the author.
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