The Kiss
Page 18
Patricia Smith is the author of eight books of poetry, including Incendiary Art (TriQuarterly, 2017); Shoulda Been Jimi Savannah (Coffee House, 2013), winner of the Lenore Marshall Prize from the Academy of American Poets; Blood Dazzler (Coffee House, 2013), a National Book Award finalist; and Gotta Go, Gotta Flow (CityFiles, 2015), with photographer Michael Abramson. Her work has appeared in Poetry, the Paris Review, the Washington Post, the New York Times, Tin House and in The Best American Poetry, The Best American Essays, and The Best American Mystery Stories. She is a Guggenheim fellow, a National Endowment for the Arts grant recipient, and a two-time winner of the Pushcart Prize. Smith is a professor at the College of Staten Island and in the MFA program at Sierra Nevada College.
Ira Sukrungruang is the author of The Melting Season (Burlesque, 2016), Southside Buddhist (University of Tampa Press, 2014), In Thailand It Is Night (University of Tampa Press, 2013), and Talk Thai: The Adventures of Buddhist Boy (University of Missouri Press, 2010). He teaches in the MFA program at the University of South Florida and edits the online journal Sweet: A Literary Confection.
Christopher Paul Wolfe, a North Carolina native, graduated from West Point in 2000 and spent six years serving as a U.S. Army officer. Wolfe holds an MBA from Duke University and is currently completing his MFA at Columbia University, where he also has served as a teaching fellow and led the Veterans Writing Workshop at Columbia University. His writing has appeared in Penthouse, Guernica, Veoir, and, more recently, in BOMB and the veterans anthology The Road Ahead: Fiction from the Forever War. Wolfe resides in Bed-Stuy, Brooklyn, with his wife and three children, and is working on a novel.
Sholeh Wolpé is an Iranian-born poet, writer, and public speaker, and is a recipient of a 2014 PEN/Heim Translation Grant, 2013 Midwest Book Award, and the 2010 Lois Roth Persian Translation Prize. Wolpé’s literary work includes four collections of poetry, two plays, three books of translations, and three anthologies. About Wolpé’s latest collection of poems, Keeping Time with Blue Hyacinths (University of Arkansas Press, 2013), Shelf Awareness magazine writes, “A gifted Iranian-American poet beautifully explores love and the loss of love, beauty and war and the ghosts of the past.” Wolpé’s modern translation of The Conference of the Birds by the twelfth-century Iranian mystic poet Attar (W. W. Norton, 2017) has been hailed by Reza Aslan as a translation that “is sure to be as timeless as the masterpiece itself.” She has lived in the UK and Trinidad and is presently based in Los Angeles.
EVERLASTING KISSES
A book on kissing wouldn’t be complete without a page filled with kisses for all who made this great assembly of meditations on kissing possible . . .
To you, who hold this book in your hands: Thank you. I hope it surprises and delights you. May all of your kisses be profoundly meaningful, forged in joy.
I’m grateful for the generosity of spirit shown by all of the writers who contributed to this anthology—as they have not only helped to create a wonderful book, but they have made the following donations possible . . . In honor of my late wife’s wishes to support the work of inventor Boyan Slat and his efforts to remove plastic from the world’s oceans, 50 percent of the proceeds from this book are being donated in her name to the organization The Ocean Cleanup (https://www.theoceancleanup.com). The remaining 50 percent will support the editorial internship program at Guernica magazine.
This project began online at Guernica magazine with the creation of a bimonthly series called “The Kiss.” As one of the cofounders and former editor-in-chief of the magazine, Michael Archer supported and encouraged the series, teaming me up with the truly phenomenal Ed Winstead. Ed and I have worked together ever since to bring Guernica’s readers the most breathtaking literary kisses possible, rain or shine. I’m thankful to the publisher and director at Guernica, Katherine Rowland, for all that she has done to see this project through.
I’m grateful to all at W. W. Norton—especially my editor, Alane Salierno Mason. Her great patience and belief in this project have remained steadfast and true, and her guidance has, at every step, aided me in the pursuit of a profound and necessary book, one worthy of a reader’s eye and ear. I send kisses and thanks to all at W. W. Norton—for believing that this world needs the sexy and the spiritual, the profane, the bewildered, the beautifully incandescent and transcendent, the many layers of intimacy and connection that kisses bring.
Many thanks go to my agent, Samar Hammam at Rocking Chair Books, who kindly donated her time on this project. I’ve been blessed by our many years of friendship and our conversations on art, life, and all that matters most. My hope is that we will shepherd many more books toward the rare high shelf, and that our conversations will deepen and brighten as we go.
To Alison Granucci and to all at Blue Flower Arts: Thank you for creating the journeys that have opened up a wider world for me and have given me the gift of friendships, year after year. Much love, always.
I’m indebted to the polymath genius and artistic vision of Benjamin Busch. He’s not only written a beautiful meditation for this anthology, but he also served as an early eye for many of the essays and stories that appear in this book. The original artworks he created for some of the early essays that appeared online are superb and set the bar for the field. His friendship is a compass fixed on all that is luminous.
Special thanks to Tony Barnstone, Stacey Lynn Brown, Kim Buchheit, Skip Buhler, Matt Cashion, Russell Conrad, Sarah Cossaboon, Roel Daamen, Nathalie Handal, Patrick Hicks, Didi Jackson, Major Jackson, Lois P. Jones, T. R. Hummer, Christian Kiefer, Krista and Henk, Benjamin and Serena Kramer, Jared Silvia, Bill Tuell, and to all in the Retro Legion. To each of you, and to all of my friends and family and teachers: Thank you for the light and love you bring to this world.
Most of all, I would like to thank Ilyse Kusnetz. This book would not have been possible without her unconditional love and encouragement, as well as her keen and unerring editorial eye. Behind the scenes and from the very beginning, she pored over each meditative essay for the series at Guernica; her insights and edits are at work throughout this anthology, sentence by sentence, word by word.
Ilyse—
I will meet you at the great door when my time has come—
as you have traveled, so brave and beautiful and brilliant,
into the unknown ahead of us . . .
My love, if there is a vault of kisses within the human frame
housing my soul, then you are the key to unlocking them.
All of my kisses are for you.
ALSO BY BRIAN TURNER
My Life as a Foreign Country
Phantom Noise
Here, Bullet
AS EDITOR
The Strangest of Theatres:
Poets Writing Across Borders
Names of certain individuals appearing in this book have been changed.
Copyright © 2018 by Brian Turner
All rights reserved
First Edition
A portion of “Kiss, Kiss, Kiss” previously appeared in Trophic Cascade
by Camille T. Dungy and is used by permission of Wesleyan University Press.
“A Reckoning of Kisses,” from Heating & Cooling: 52 Micro-Memoirs
by Beth Ann Fennelly. Copyright © 2017 by Beth Ann Fennelly.
Used by permission of W. W. Norton & Company, Inc.
For information about permission to reproduce selections from
this book, write to Permissions, W. W. Norton & Company, Inc.,
500 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10110
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Book design by JAMdesign
Production manager: Julia Druskin
JACKET DESIGN BY KEENAN
JACKET PHOTOGRAPH: © JONATHAN STOREY / GETTY IMAGES
The Library of Congress has cataloged the printed edition as follows:
Names: Turner, Brian,
1967– editor.
Title: The kiss : intimacies from writers / edited by Brian Turner.
Other titles: Kiss (W. W. Norton & Company)
Description: First edition. | New York : W. W. Norton & Company, [2018] |
Includes bibliographical references.
Identifiers: LCCN 2017056377 | ISBN 9780393635263 (hardcover)
Subjects: LCSH: Kissing. | Kissing in literature.
Classification: LCC GT2640 .K58 2018 | DDC 394—dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017056377
ISBN: 978-0-393-63527-0 (e-book)
W. W. Norton & Company, Inc., 500 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10110
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