The Glove

It’s hard to imagine history more irresistibly told than it is in The Swan’s Nest, Laura. McNeal’s novel about the love affair between two giants of nineteenth century poetry, Robert Browning and Elizabeth Barrett. Its contours are, surely, familiar to many — or at least, the letters between them, whose first object of love was verse. McNeal brings us inside their love and lives with a daring imagined intimacy. Or at least, I dare you not to be rapt by the first sentences of this text, which didn’t make it into the final version of the novel. And then imagine what did.

—Jina Moore Ngarambe for Guernica

There was a time when he was just one syllable or two, and his sister Pinkie called across the yard at twilight, Eb! Ebby! Come home! and he ran in his limber body over the grass at Cinnamon Hill, Jamaica.

He has never been back. Horses and carriages pass the heavily draped window with a growing frequency as the hour for dinner nears. A fist pounds dough, people run upstairs, china rings as it’s placed on tables. Every sound is the sound of a person who must be paid