“under tables with green fire. / we are thinking / who's the child”

“One of us remembers the honeyed ink / in the waiting womb…”

“…I can see it’s a black, shrunken stick about ten feet high, stripped of the bark I once ran my fingers over.”

“One spring, the tree—their oak tree—developed a strange rash.”

“I could not comprehend how love for someone other than me could be called love for me. Love sees only the beloved, I believed. Two faces turned toward each other alone.”

What would happen if all works in all languages were universally readable? New forms of thinking, new colors for the literary palette, and ultimately, the possibility of atypical influences. To put an old trope on its head, everything has been invented, but not every invention has been discovered.

"I loved that, no matter where the characters went underground, they came out into the same space..I could see a double-paged spread showing a huge old fashioned attic — full of the different entry points. To me, the story said, whatever you think you know about the rules of life, forget it, ain’t necessarily true."  

Rivka Galchen has never published the same kind of book.

What are snakes afraid of?