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The Angel of Retail

  Poems The Angel of Retail By  May 18, 2026 Save this story You spirit of grace in the taffy machine’s chrome arms At Morris’s Candy performing a sarabande Unknitting and knitting again immaculate sweets. You spirit of order in a plank across uprights Between us patrons and visible bottles: a bar, The barrier presence attending to our pleasure. Angel of displays recurrent, mortal and porous, Dry goods and hardware and the fearsome eyeless Heads I remember at Dlugos’s Ladies’ Hats. New spirits of the body, Pilates and Threading, I needed explained. My ignorance not like that Of those who hissed “At thy unequal’d Play The Alchymist: Oh fie upon ’em,” says Herrick Son of a goldsmith, praising Ben Jonson. Like Twain’s Dauphin and Duke, his Subtle the Alchemist scams Us townsfolk, selling Abel Drugger a magnet To attract customers. No joke, ruthless Angel: In Greenwood murderous white rioters destroyed Eldridge’s Grille and Lewis’s Meats and Sundries— More shocking than the bank,...
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Tsvetaeva: The Tragic Life

  Tsvetaeva: The Tragic Life | Charles Simic | The New York Review of Books Tsvetaeva: The Tragic Life Charles Simic February 13, 2003 issue Reviewed: Earthly Signs: Moscow Diaries, 1917–1922 by Marina Tsvetaeva, edited, translated, and with an introduction by Jamey Gambrell Yale University Press, 250 pp., $24.95 Milestones by Marina Tsvetaeva, translated and with an introduction by Robin Kemball Northwestern University Press, 272 pp., $24.95 When it comes to the Russian poetry of the last century, Osip Mandelstam, Anna Akhmatova, and Boris Pasternak are reasonably familiar names, but not Marina Tsvetaeva, who is their equal. Because she is extraordinarily difficult to translate, her work is almost unknown, and even when it becomes available it makes little impression. She seems foreign and beyond reach with her elliptical syntax and her unusually tangled metaphors. There’s also the sheer volume and range of her writing. One of her long poems, for instance, celebrates Lindbergh’s t...
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The Marvels of Walter Benjamin

The Marvels of Walter Benjamin J.M. Coetzee January 11, 2001 issue Reviewed: Selected Writings, Volume 1: 1913-1926 Edmund Jephcott, Harry Zohn, and others. by Walter Benjamin, edited by Marcus Bullock, edited by Michael W. Jennings. Translated from the German by Rodney Livingstone, Stanley Corngold, Belknap Press/Harvard University Press, 520 pp., $37.50 Selected Writings,Volume 2: 1927-1934 by Walter Benjamin, edited by Michael W. Jennings, edited by Howard Eiland, edited by Gary Smith. Translated from the German by Rodney Livingstone and others. Belknap Press/Harvard University Press, 870 pp., $37.50 The Arcades Project by Walter Benjamin, Translated from the German and French by Howard Eiland and Kevin McLaughlin Belknap Press/Harvard University Press, 1,073 pp., $39.95 1. The story is by now so well known that it barely needs to be retold. The setting is the Franco-Spanish border, the time 1940. Walter Benjamin, fleeing occupied France, presents himself to the wife of a certain Fi...
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