Two novels and an excerpt from a book-length poem

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        My father has a glum nature.  He retired three years ago, and he doesn't talk much.  Left to himself, he can remain silent for days.  When this happens, he begins brooding, he begins thinking strange thoughts.  Recently he told me that I was selfish, that I had always been selfish, that when I was a baby I would start to cry as soon as he turned on the TV.  I am forty and he is seventy-two.  When he said this, I began tickling him.  I was in my parents' house in New Jersey, on a sofa in their living room.  "Who's the sad baby?" I said.  "Who's the baby that cries all the time?"
        "Get away," he squeaked, as he fell back and tried to wriggle away.  "Stop being a joker.  I'm not kidding." 
--From Family Life, a novel by Akhil Sharma (W.W. Norton, 2014). 

        He is twenty-six, and for as long as he's lived in the north there has been only the Aleut woman. 
        Several evenings a week he comes to her door with a duck or a rabbit and she asks him in.  Not asks, exactly.  She opens the door and steps aside so he can enter.
        She lives in a frame house hammered together fast out of boards and tar paper, a house like all the others in Anchorage, except it isn't on First or Fourth or even Ninth Street; instead it is off to the east, marooned on the mud flats.  But she has things in it, like anyone else, a table and two chairs, flour and tea on a shelf, a hat hanging from a peg.  She wears a dress with buttons and she cooks at a stove, and the two of them eat before, and then after she sits cross-legged in the tub and smokes her pipe. 
--From The Seal Wife, a novel by Kathryn Harrison (Random House, 2002). 

Come, it's time to set the table,
dusk is bruised with rain, the water is alive
under the wind, evening is
upon us.  Outside, the animals make their
accommodation, the lake loses its reflection,
settles deeper.  Set down the brush
on the saucer, leave off the book,
open, with its words against the pillow. . . . 
--From Correspondences, a collaboration by poet Anne Michaels and artist Bernice Eisenstein (Alfred A. Knopf, 2013).  An excerpt from the book-length poem was included in Knopf's Poem-a-Day newsletter, in honor of Poetry Month, on April 26, 2014.  The excerpted material is also available online as a printable  broadside.