This week UNP will be at AWP! The AWP Conference & Bookfair is the annual destination for writers, teachers, students, editors, and publishers of contemporary creative writing. Enjoy a sneak peek of the UNP books you can grab there.

Henrietta Goodman’s Antillia is haunted by ghosts of all kinds, these poems also look forward and outward into a world where social inequality and environmental disaster meet the possibility of of metamorphosis. We will be hosting an author signing with Henrietta Goodman on February 8th at booth 1334/1336 from 3pm to 3:30pm as part of our programming. Mark your calendars!

The Puppy and Kitten Channel

Remember the night I passed my test
and the Thai place where you took me
brought my rice pressed into the shape
of a heart, a maraschino cherry bleeding
sweetly on the top? It’s an old story—
once there was an atom who wanted to
be a molecule. I’ve thought a lot about
innocence since then— the sleeping otters
floating on their backs in the aquarium
pool, paws linked, the human presence
behind the animal videos on the Internet—
intimate laughter, murmured words
in Russian or Norwegian while puppies
lick each other’s faces or a baby deer
eats from someone’s hand. I’ve watched
the puppy and kitten channel. At the Origami
Club, you can learn to make a whole paper
world— origami strawberry shortcake,
origami water bug, origami chicken
hatching from an egg. Do you ever feel
completely ruined? The man with no arms
and no legs takes an egg into his mouth
and drops it into a bowl, takes a whisk
into his mouth and scrambles, takes
the bowl into his mouth and wheels
to the stove, takes a spatula into his mouth
and lifts the egg onto a plate, bits
of shell and all. Takes a fork into his
mouth. Turns and grins. Do you feel
ruined now? Yes, still ruined, and guilty.
Click again, and a couple laughs as a kitten
and a bunny tumble across a flowered
rug. The otters float apart, then back
together. The origami bride smooths
a wrinkle in her immaculate dress.

What Are We Going to Turn Into?

When he was four or five, my son would sometimes ask.
As if these bodies were not our final form. As if nature
or magic might deliver us. Too shy to sing at the Christmas
concert, to clap or shape his fingers into antlers or falling
snow, his hair a blond wave like Hermey the Elf’s. When
one of my professors told me the only neighborhood I could
afford wasn’t safe, he meant it wasn’t white. I stepped
barefoot onto the porch to call my son for dinner and the door
locked behind me. My neighbors came home, and while
I gestured, not knowing how to say locked out or anything
else in Spanish, the man put down his groceries, crossed
my yard, removed the AC unit from my window, picked up
my son and boosted him through. I stood there repeating
gracias. I thought the people on that street might not want
us there—and they passed plates of burgers and potato salad
and chocolate cake over the fence, and Ivan’s mother told him
to give the toys he had outgrown to my son—so many dinosaurs—
and I know I wasn’t anything but lucky, but even the desperate
man who knocked on my door at 2:00 a.m. to try to sell a pair
of boots apologized for waking me and didn’t punch through
the window. I wish I could say that when Jeremiah’s grandmother
came down the street and put out her hand, I wasn’t so aware
of mine—so soft, so small, so white. Almost ten years gone
from Lubbock, and last night my son brought from his father’s
house a green caterpillar his father threw on an anthill. My son
reached for it, swatted the ants that climbed his arm, made it
a home with dirt and pink blossoms and leaves and sticks
in a plastic cup labeled St. Patrick’s Hospital from the week
he spent there trying not to want to die, and I’m thinking
of how Gabriel’s father used to go around shirtless with huge
muscles and a huge grin calling my son Casper, how we laughed
together, and I’m thinking about that question, based on
the simplest metaphor I know, the only one that matters.