Introduction

It's been a great joy for me to work as an editor again, to have the privilege of sampling the range and richness of contemporary writing at its sources, and of compiling some of that writing in what's essentially a book, created as much by its internal juxtapositions as by individual pieces' indelible strengths. Prose and poetry share some of the same obsessions: we are at once corporeal and historical beings, existing in our physicality and our narratives, with the two often at odds. So Rosa Luxemburg and Antonio Gramsci discuss disability, AIDS is a silent communicant in a tea ceremony, Fanny Burney's mastectomy is lived through by a poet-survivor. The body of the text is itself closely examined:  boundaries are permeated. Alfred Corn's poems and prose commentaries coalesce into a meditation on Bach, Kafka, faith, and history; Adrian C. Louis's anguished paragraphs rise and condense into the poetry of loss; Catherine Gammon examines the border of accountability between fiction and reportage.

Here at the end of the century there is AIDS, hunger, cancer, the shadows of Auschwitz and Hiroshima behind the vivid presence of those easiest to dismiss or dispossess:  young black men, women with HIV, Spanish- or Arabic-speaking immigrants, people of ambiguous race or gender. When writers reflect on these presences, does it make for depressing reading? I'm elated, instead, at the bravado and dazzle these writers muster, staring down the void, at their virtuosity, their gourmandise for language -- or languages -- their eagerness to open the windows and doors of words on all their stories.