Sarah Manguso, a 2012 Guggenheim Fellow in Nonfiction, contributed her poem “Getting Over the Twentieth Century” to NER (25.4):
[read more]At first it just sat on its pages, crying at me.
The twentieth century let me discover it.
I loved it so much I tattooed a hundred-year calendar on my wrist.
Its space exploration and its acid trips are what I miss most,
and I want to go back even though the possibility of time travel was already gone by its third decade.
At times I pity it, a century lost inside another one like a toy boat floating in the pump room.
Almost no one goes in there.