The Quiet Winter

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The Quiet Winter, a chapbook by Carrie Bennett (Dancing Girl Press, 2012). I really liked the way this collection was formatted. There was a lot of white space on each page, so that each set of words looked a bit like a snowflake, and there was a quietness to the words themselves, both in terms of the layout and the content.
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"what monster," a poem by Kristy Bowen, from her chapbook havoc (Dancing Girl Press, 2011).
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"Walkers," a poem by Stephanie Barbé Hammer, from her chapbook Sex with Buildings: Prose Poems (Dancing Girl Press, 2012).

A poem by Claudia Serea and two chapbooks from Dancing Girl Press

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She filled the yard of the sky
with domestic animals and birds,

and the yard screeched
when it turned,
like a rusty wheel,
with the shrill of crickets.

From "Away from the lights of the house," a poem by Claudia Serea, continued in Grey Sparrow Journal (Winter Issue, January 18, 2013).

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"Ella at the Cafe," a poem by Liz Kay, from her chapbook Something to Help Me Sleep (Dancing Girl Press, 2012).

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"Medina Street" (page 7), "Absence" (p. 14), and "Ladies' Night" (p. 26), poems by Sara Tracey, from her chapbook Flood Year (Dancing Girl Press, 2009).

From Sara Tracey's poem "Ladies' Night":

The rain was always doing things like this,
always the wrong night, the wrong back yard.
One hundred other things would be worse,
but right now, you can't think of any.
Forget riding five to a taxi, forget metro cards.
Tonight, you're walking two miles
with no umbrella, your favorite jeans
wet to your knees. See, even though you checked
the forecast, this is the kind of night
you'll end up crying in the bathroom
while some guy you don't want to kiss
holds your coat. . . .

Still Falling for Her, and Now Is the Time for Us to Be Sweet

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. . . I do not need a picture to
remind me of the look on my mom's
face, when she sang--extreme yearning,
a yearning out at the edge of what was
socially acceptable
on a ship like that . . .

From "Still Falling for Her," a poem by Sharon Olds, The New Yorker (December 5, 2011, pp. 54-55).
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When it's too hard to get on from the past, the best thing you can do is stop thinking, stop trying. Get a hobby, a new cat. Addict yourself to whatever little thing you have found as your grind. Your drink, your pill, your loveseat naps. It can work. You grind into it. And then Eric Eicher enrolls in your poetry class, transfers in a week after the semester starts.

From "Now Is the Time for Us to Be Sweet," a short story by Molly Tolsky, The Collagist (Issue 29, December 2011).

Dear Life

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Dear Life, a collection of short stories by Alice Munro (Knopf, 2012). This book includes, at the end, four pieces that she describes as "autobiographical in feeling, though not, sometimes, entirely so in fact."

A little bit of Dear Life, and Mrs. Dalloway

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... he was annoyed when the girl who took the tickets told him that she was going to have to quit, because she was having a baby. He might have expected this--she had been married for half a year, and in those days you were supposed to get out of the public eye before you began to show--but he so disliked change and the idea of people having private lives that he was taken by surprise.

From "Leaving Maverley," originally published in The New Yorker (November 28, 2011) and reprinted in Dear Life, a collection of short stories by Alice Munro (Knopf, 2012).

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And then, opening her eyes, how fresh like frilled linen clean from a laundry laid in wicker trays the roses looked . . .

From Mrs. Dalloway, a novel by Virginia Woolf (Harcourt, 1925).

Three poems and a short story

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"Invitation," a poem by Mike White, West Branch (Issue 65, Fall/Winter 2009).

"The Ruin of Amalfitano," a short story by Roberto Bolaño, translated from the Spanish by Natasha Wimmer, Harper's Magazine (October 2012, pp. 67-74).

"Remember to Learn from Your Mistakes," a poem by JodiAnn Stevenson, www.bowlofmilk.com (2003).

"Fruit," a poem by JodiAnn Stevenson, www.bowlofmilk.com (2004).

Unless (Carol Shields)

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"In my new life--the summer of the year 2000--I am attempting to 'count my blessings.' Everyone I know advises me to take up this repellant strategy, as though they really believe a dramatic loss can be replaced by the renewed appreciation of all one has been given."

"My daughter is living like a vagabond on the streets of Toronto, but even so I had to have four yards of screened bark mulch delivered to the house this morning, $141.91, including haulage."

From Unless, a novel by Carol Shields (HarperCollins, 2002).