The shelves are ugly and next to them is a garbage chute leading God knows where. Entire pallet loads get dumped in there: 2 years, 3 years, 4 years, as boxes wind up on the charity van, back in the world. Some of it is shredded; some is crisp—laundered once, folded, never worn.

When hunting, an Inuit man makes an igloo a day. Some of them have ice windows.

Once a day he walks away from the snow house by the snow hill.

An Inuit elder who saw an airplane says, It was talked about for a long time. It was constantly talked about as something that looked like a loon that

For years I could barely write a page. I thought I was becoming a virtuoso of smallness while the grief, which is wordless, occupied an ever-greater volume.

My friend lived in the estates on the bad side of town. Let’s go to the forest, she said when I went over to play. There were three trees in the yard, but if you know where to stand, you can get lost in a forest of three trees. She could do it. She had to. Her mother died when we were nine.

I used to be interested in mountains.


They moved at a speed I could deal with. They waited for me to catch up.


It was like that all my life.

You might as well start by confessing your greatest shame. Anything else would just be exposition.

“I began really writing again once I became a mother, and I think this is parallel to a sudden intense fear of death and renewed grief.”

Sarah Manguso’s collection of arguments about desire, ambition, and failure is out next month from Graywolf.

The Thursday edition of the Riverdale Press carried a story that began An unidentified white man was struck and instantly killed by a Metro-North train last night as it pulled into the Riverdale station on West 254th Street. The train’s enginee…