The mood: Titanic tickets burn against your chest,
and still you cannot help but sail.
Soon this land is going to sink as well.
The question is—who’s first?

By some oversight there are still mostly fields between Bologna and Venice, intimately familiar to me after the eight years I spent translating Italian sonnets about farm implements and irrigation troughs by a guy improbably celebrated as the founder of modern Italian poetry. From the train, vast le...

When I lived abroad at the end of my twenties, I luxuriated in feeling unseen. Across the ocean from the city I’d left, I could be anonymous. It thrilled me that no one in this new place knew . . .

If I was writing about trash, I needed to investigate its history. The Covanta incinerator in Newark burns five miles from my house. Beside my office in Queens is the landfill buried under Flushing Meadows Park. I learned that the U.S. is the world’s largest producer of garbage...

Five hundred in cash and a pouch of rum was what we were each paid upon returning the flags. Yet another rally of the big leader behind us and yet another fruitful day of cheering done. . .

I was almost two, and it was altogether a more innocent time, when my family immigrated from Kyiv to Chicago. Reagan was the president-elect, and Disco Demolition Night in Comiskey Park only a few months in the rearview. In those days, my babblings came out in Russian...