Introduction / Bill Henderson -- Everything ravaged, everything burned / Wells Tower -- The limit / Christian Wiman -- The lace maker / Carl Dennis -- Scordatura / Mark Ray Lewis -- How to meditate / Brenda Miller -- The sensual world / Louise Gluck -- Lunch at the Blacksmith / Cornelia Nixon -- To be honest / Jeffrey A. Lockwood -- The past / Chris Forhan -- The Mandelbrot set / Janet Burroway -- Camp Cedar Crest / Alexander Theroux -- From the psalter / Jennifer Atkinson -- Casualidades / Carolyn Alessio -- Solatium -- Philip D. Beidler -- The church of omnivorous light / Robert Wrigley -- House of stone and song / Margaret Gibson -- The pass / Steve Almond -- Line / John Hales -- The beauties of nature / Mary Jo Bang -- Ode to the air traffic controller / Joshua Beckman -- The lives of strangers / Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni -- Traveling with my mother / Katherine Taylor -- Prayer against the experts and their ways / Paul Maliszewski -- The part of the bee's body embedded in the flesh / Carol Frost -- I demand to know where you're taking me / Dan Chaon -- Ginkgo tree / Tom Crawford -- The master of Delft / Aleksandr Kushner -- Cock robin / Miranda Field -- Amazing grace / Bradford Morrow -- Heat waves in winter distance / James Galvin -- The road to Rome, and back again / Michael Palma -- The least you need to know about radio / Ben Marcus -- Cord / Linda Gregerson -- On the nature of human romantic interaction / Karl Iagnemma -- Night train / Ted Genoways.

Fields of mercy / Ladette Randolph -- The woman who hated Valentine's Day / Susan Hahn -- The worst degree of unforgivable / Nicholas Montemarano -- The hickeys on Sally Palermo's neck: some thoughts on beauty and the creative life / Andrea Hollander Budy -- Two variations on a theme by Stevens / Sarah Manguso -- Pilgrims / Julie Orringer -- Red berries / Jane Hirshfield -- Where the dog is buried / Gary Gildner -- Book / Robert Pinsky -- Candace counts soup / Nancy Lord -- (My lot to spin the purple: that the tabernacle should be made) / D.A. Powell -- Sister Carrie at 101 / Joseph Epstein -- He writes to the soul / Christopher Howell -- Dangerous discoveries / Melanie Rae Thon -- In the cafe / Grace Schulman -- Yangban / Junse Kim -- from The lightning field / Carol Moldaw -- Jinx / Aimee Bender -- Autumn in the yard we planted / Ellen Bryant Voigt -- The instructor / Joyce Carol Oates -- Cloud atlas / Donald Platt -- Landscape with bees / David Young -- Cabeza / Monique De Varennes -- For a Chinese poet writing through the night up on the edge of Mt. Pollux / Dara Wier -- Autochthonic song / Rebecca Seiferle -- Sonnet / Karen Volkman -- Heron / William Wenthe -- Off Island / Michael Parker -- Killing salmon / Matt Yurdana -- A working boy's Whitman / George Evans -- The weight / Richard Bausch.