Destiny, the 18-year-old protagonist of “Muscle Memory,” one of Katherine Karlin’s best stories, is determined to become a welder. With her family’s stability demolished by Hurricane Katrina, Destiny has taken the lowest paying job in the shipyard, overseeing equipment sign-out to help support herself and her mother. “You’re not going to learn anything stuck down here,” a co-worker warns her, a fact that Destiny is acutely aware of. If the workplace is where most of us size up our place in the world, Destiny is in search of something at once humble and utterly life-changing: a skill. Whether

There is remarkably little good poetry about very small children. Maybe it’s the lack of sleep that does it; for the first few months it’s hard to remember to put out the bins, let alone write poems. Perhaps the first writer to make a serious attempt to evoke the world of earliest childhood was the Latin poet Statius, a contemporary of the Roman emperor Domitian (ad 81–96). In one of his most remarkable poems, Statius describes taking a newborn baby boy in his arms, “as he demanded the novel air with trembling wails”. Bit by bit, he learned to interpret the child’s inarticulate complaints and

The crowd that filled the auditorium at the Museum of Modern Art earlier this month twinkled with eccentric glasses and necklaces. Most hair was gray or graying; viewing audience members’ heads from an auditorium perch was a little like gazing down at a cloud from an airplane window. Their color suited the occasion: we had gathered to celebrate the life of Dorothea Tanning, a surrealist poet and painter who turned 101 over the summer.

Best known for her early surrealist paintings, which hang in the Tate Modern, the Pompidou, the MoMA, and other museums, Tanning is also a noteworthy poet.

Translated by Robin Fulton

Two Cities

Each on its side of a strait, two cities

the one blacked out, occupied by the enemy.

In the other the lamps are burning.

The bright shore hypnotizes the dark one.

I swim out in a trance

on the glittering dark waters.

A dull tuba-blast penetrates.

It’s a friend’s voice, take up your grave and walk.

The Light Streams In

Outside the window, the long beast of spring

the transparent dragon of sunlight

rushes past like an endless

suburban train—we never got a glimpse of its head.

The shoreline villas shuffle sideways

they are proud as crabs.

Born in Omaha in 1932, the year Franklin Roosevelt was elected president, Christopher Lasch graduated from Harvard in 1954, during the Eisenhower era’s mood of anxious complacency, and from there went directly to Columbia to do graduate work in history. Lasch’s career as a historian began as it would end forty years later with his death, with a search for the moral resources for the next New Deal. Lasch rejected the liberal history of Arthur Schlesinger Jr.—whose legitimation of the cold war he disliked, and whose view of the permanence of the New Deal’s achievements he found naïve. He learned