(French Germinadour, a Hardneck Purple Stripe Garlic)
My father was born in Russia, my mother in Poland.
They grew garlic in our garden in Pennsylvania, near Pittsburgh.
If I had an ear ache Poppa pushed a garlic clove into my ear.
If I had a toothache Momma made me chew garlic cloves.

Over the last thirty-five years I have collected eighty-five varieties
of garlic from seventeen different countries. They differ in:
appearance, size, skin colors, number of cloves, taste.
To defeat the gophers, I plant in wood boxes with wire bottoms.
Planting-time: September through November.
60 boxes, 150 cloves planted in each box.

Reading Will Alexander’s poetry is like walking into a Jackson Pollock painting: you get lost in a maelstrom of colors, lulled by beautifully constructed metaphors, and unexpectedly shaken by the jarring sounds of each hard-handed stroke. Through Alexander’s work, words fill three-dimensional forms and talk back to you with distinct colors, voices and angles. An autodidact born and raised in South Central L.A., Alexander’s early work didn’t fit into conventional, academically defined structures. After years of carving out his own niche, Alexander is now internationally recognized as a leading literary figure. A poet, essayist, novelist and visual artist, his accomplishments include the Whiting Fellowship for Poetry in 2001 and a California Arts Council Fellowship in 2002, and he was named by The International Biographical Centre in Cambridge as the Outstanding Scholar of the 20th Century. Alexander’s most recent collection of poetry, The Sri Lankan Loxodrome, is a surreal adventure embedded with a lexicon all its own and laced with seemingly disconnected words applied to the page like that of smattered paint.

Editor’s Note:

Solid foundation, sound structure, and vision—key components of any worthy story, of any significant work of art, perhaps of all righteous creation.

The importance of structure and foundation is certainly a prominent theme in this issue of FORTH. We’ve been fortunate to feature best-selling author T.C. Boyle, whose dynamic construction of story and character is masterfully evident in his fiction. In this issue, we’ve published an excerpt from Boyle’s novel The Women, which happens to center on renowned architect Frank Lloyd Wright and the building and breakdown of Wright’s intimate relations. Forth editor Julia Ingalls also interviewed innovative architect Eric Owen Moss, whose prolific art and philosophy inspires a bold and beautiful message about the magnitude of structural composition.

Read and Listen to the Interview

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