Winter’s Tale
Reading Maxine Kumin in quarantine solitude, I’ve found something familiar in the way that little details come alive when larger, flashier things have fallen away. Kumin is known for quiet, observational poems, and “Winter’s Tale,” published in The Atlantic in 2009, is quiet both in style and subject matter. “Even from my study at the back of the house I can hear an orange drop upstairs,” she writes.