From the Mummy’s Breast (on The Fourth Watch of the Night by Louie Skipper; Les Mots Anglais by Christopher Sawyer-Laucanno; Music Like Dirt by Frank Bidart; Base Pairs by Maria Melendez; The First Thing by Anna Kirwan; and The Circumference of Arrival by Sandra Meek)

Paul Zimmer lives on a farm in southwestern Wisconsin. In the fifteen years since his retirement from a long career in university publishing, he has published two books each of poetry and essay-memoir. His first novel, The Mysteries of Soldiers Grove, is forthcoming from Permanent Press in early 2015, when he will be eighty years old—which surely makes him, he believes, one of the oldest first novelists ever.