Contributions by Debora Kuan
Debora Kuan is a poet, fiction writer, and critic. She holds degrees from Princeton University and the University of Iowa Writers’ Workshop, where she studied poetry. Her first book of poems, XING, was published by Saturnalia Books in 2011. Her fiction has appeared or is forthcoming in The Brooklyn Rail, The Iowa Review, The Rumpus, Opium, Wigleaf, and other publications. She has also written about contemporary art, books, and film for Artforum, Art in America, Modern Painters, and Paper Monument. She is working on a novel. Like Julio Cortázar, she too is an axolotl.
The Turtle & the Fox
Debora Kuan
Take him for all in all, I shall not look upon his like again.
-Shakespeare, Hamlet
My first encounter with my colleague Ivan Fox’s house in Trenton was a small, late-summer dinner party. It was a balmy dusk. Another coworker, who lived a few blocks away from me in Princeton, picked me up at my apartment. As we drove, the ivy-swathed Gothic architecture and Tudor storefronts of our university town gradually gave way to stucco municipal buildings, one-room churches, chain-link fences, hand-painted signs, and rundown Victorian residences. On Ivan’s street, a group of black teenaged boys were standing in the road; they peered at us through the windshield, and then parted to let our car through.
The house stood at the corner of an intersection with a dead-end street, one side of it almost completely obscured … Read More »
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