Her heart fails her and the body holding it
lies on its side, the lungs taking on fluid
so it will be, we are told, like drowning
we can’t stop and each week’s watch is a hot
potato we relay over Nantucket Sound rotating
by ferry in partial acceptance full steam ahead
from Woods Hole to the Vineyard and back
like sailboats on moorings, the buds on trees
at each landfall swelling, halyards banging
and banging aluminum masts,
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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