Introduction / Bill Henderson --
Human snowball / Davy Rothbart --
Enlightenment / Natasha Trethewey --
Corn maze / Pam Houston --
A full-service shelter / Amy Hempel --
During a break from feeling / Mary Ruefle --
Thirst / Taymiya R. Zaman --
Blues in five/four, the violence in Chicago / Afaa Michael Weaver --
What happens in hell / Charles Baxter --
After suicide / Matt Rasmussen --
Teen culture / Elizabeth Ellen --
Last call / Saeed Jones --
The healing power of the western oystercatcher / Howard Norman --
Cranes, mafiosos and a Polaroid camera / Natalie Diaz --
God of ducks / Tina Louise Blevins --
The ultrasound / David Hornibrook --
Lorry raja / Madhuri Vijay --
Origin / Sarah Lindsay --
The dead / Stephen Dixon --
From That once were beautiful children / Claudia Rankine --
Late oracle sonnet / David St. John --
Self-portrait with exit wounds / Ocean Vuong --
Reliquaries / Paul Zimmer --
Listening to Virginia / Jeffrey Harrison --
Iconography / Ays̜e Papatya Bucak --
Tallahatchie / Susan B.A. Somers-Willett --
Father of disorder / Jessica Wilbanks --
Your body down in gold / Carl Phillips --
The piece need not be built / Andrew Zolot --
The monster: classifications and explanations / Susan Slaviero --
Don't let them catch you / Molly Patterson --
The separaton/retention / Kwame Dawes --
Writing & publishing a memoir: what the hell have I done? / Andre Dubus III --
A summer garden / Louise Glück --
Donate! / Jack Livings --
Things to think about / Scott Beal --
The field museum / Roger Reeves --
A portrait of the writer as a rabbit / Sabine Heinlein --
There were such things / W.S. Di Piero --
Likable / Deb Olin Unferth --
The story / B.H. Fairchild --
Consequence / Eric Fair --
The lit cloud / Mei-Mei Berssenbrugge --
The reader / Robert Coover --
Islands / Yusef Komunyakaa --
Confessions of a recovering environmentalist / Paul Kingsnorth --
Ways to begin a poem / Rachel Rose --
In Colorado my father scoured and stacked dishes / Eduardo C. Corral --
Housebreaking / Sarah Frisch --
W.C. Fields takes a walk / Paisley Rekdal --
Out of date: the joys of obsolescence / Hal Crowther --
My neighbor's body / Beckian Fritz Goldberg --
Philanthropy / Suzanne Rivecca / Interrupting aubade ending in epiphany / Marcus Wicker --
Painting the summer palace of the queen / Philip Kelly --
Villon's epitaph (ballade of the hanged men) / François Villon --
If the man took / Joanna Ruocco --
All-American / David Hernandez --
The waste land app / Tess Taylor --
Akhmatova / Matthew Dickman --
Cadiz, Missouri / Robert Long Foreman --
Getting by / Bob Hicok --
Imagination / Sigrid Nunez --
The earth itself / Timothy Donnelly --
Love like that / Jude Nutter --
The gentleman's library, a nowaday redux / Bill Cotter --
Self-portrait as Superman (alternate take) / Jake Adam York.