Too late now to look for houses
to give readings, to flirt, to eat blueberries,
to dance the polka—
or just to be in the
Serbian-American club in Duquesne
near that horrible McKeesport, near
that horrible Kennywood Park, and take
a sip, a bite, and half fall off my
stool, and grab her and whirl for fifteen
straight, or just to feel her breasts
against me and to loosen my tie, or just to
drive home slowly, sometimes even
on the streetcar tracks themselves,
that 68 trolley I loved so much, the
love seats and the rattling glass windows.


The American poet Gerald Stern has passed away. He was born in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania on February 22, 1925. Some of his noteworthy books of poetry include Galaxy Love (W. W. Norton, 2017); American Sonnets (W. W. Norton, 2002); This Time: New and Selected Poems (W. W. Norton, 1998), winner of the National Book Award; Bread Without Sugar (W. W. Norton, 1992), winner of the Paterson Poetry Prize; Leaving Another Kingdom: Selected Poems (HarperCollins, 1990), a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in Poetry; The Red Coal (Houghton Mifflin Co., 1981), recipient of the Melville Caine Award from the Poetry Society of America; and Lucky Life (Carnegie Mellon University Press, 1977), recipient of the 1977 Lamont Poetry Selection of the Academy of American Poets and nominee for a National Book Critics Circle Award. In 2000, he was named Poet Laureate of New Jersey, and, in 2006, he was elected a Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets. For several years, he taught at the University of Iowa Writers’ Workshop.