Books by Priscilla Becker
Open City #22: Fiction/Nonfiction
by Jerry Stahl, Vestal McIntyre, Sam Lipsyte, Leni Zumas, Vince Passaro, Open City Magazine, Jonathan Baumbach, Herbert Gold, Jocko Weyland, Priscilla Becker
A literary magazine of fiction, poetry, and artwork, Open City has a youthful, adventurous spirit and an uncanny knack for finding vibrant and original voices. It’s a rare cultural phenomenon: a literary journal that entices readers and writers from each new generation, and makes people genuinely excited about literature and the thrill of discovering something fresh. Open City #22, a special double-sided fiction/nonfiction issue, features writing by Sam Lipsyte, Edmund White, Stanley Crouch, Priscilla Becker, Matthew Kirby, Ann Hillesland, and a stunning fiction debut by Suhay Rosario.
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Stories that Listen
Priscilla Becker, whose first book of poems, Internal West, won The Paris Review Book Prize, has written an astonishingly precise second collection, Stories That Listen. These poems attempt to come to terms with absences personal and global: one speaker wonders if a former partner still uses her map which “showed the world / before it broke up into separate / continents.” Another, missing a departed friend, retraces her steps, “took a tour of your former apartments.” The recipient of a letter containing “a fraction of an ounce of Chanel Mademoiselle” attempts to understand the sender’s motives, “tried to scrape together enough dust / to fill a bowl or roll a minuscule cigarette. / I thought perhaps that this was your intent.”
Stories That Listen offers a science of the human, a way to understand the world through watching closely. Becker deftly slows action down—we see fingers “curl /around my coffee cup”—to find the remarkable, the noteworthy, in the everyday. Quirky, at times outright funny, always wise, Stories That Listen is a resonant, rewarding read.
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