Contributors

Peter Orner
Contributor History

Biography
Peter Orner
Bard Fiction Prize winner Peter Orner is the author of two novels, The Second Coming of Mavala Shikongo and Love and Shame and Love (both Little, Brown); and three story collections, Esther Stories (Back Bay Books), Last Car Over the Sagamore Bridge, and Maggie Brown & Others (both Little, Brown). His memoir, Am I Alone Here? (Catapult), was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award. A new collection of essays, Notes in the Margin, will be out next year. Orner’s stories have been anthologized in Best American Short Stories and twice received a Pushcart Prize. He has been awarded the Rome Prize from the American Academy of Arts and Letters and the American Academy in Rome, a Guggenheim Fellowship, a two-year Lannan Foundation Literary Fellowship, as well as a Fulbright to Namibia. He is a Professor of English and Creative Writing at Dartmouth College and lives with his family in Norwich, Vermont. 

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In Print

Vol. 80
Ways of Water
Spring 2023
Edited by Bradford Morrow

Online

September 20, 2023
The Rachel stands tuned  
            to multiplicities, 
aslant in a territory of longing,
            where she becomes foreign.

            What has she found?
She listens, acknowledges another sound,
            diffuse, multiple,  
pulsing thought, oscillations, whisperings,
            never only one.
September 13, 2023
I had yet to discover the source of that star, it came and it passed but from where it sprang and then fell to fading remained a mystery. In cycling its light lent its powers to coloring my tablecloth a lighter shade, relieving pigment from its duty to darken, except for those spots where I placed my bottles and cups, shielding only parts of the piece from fading, threads left closer to their original hues hewed to others abandoned as wraiths to their fates, a darker ring the mark of those who stayed behind.
September 6, 2023
Where the trees blackened, I saw,

Quickly, three deer lean into goldenness.

It seems, although wildfires rage

Out of control, this world remembers

Some portion of its first purposes:

Superfluous beauty