Summary

The narrator arrives at New York-Presbyterian Hospital to donate sperm for Alex. The narrator is both nervous and embarrassed, and so leaves quickly upon completion. At the Park Slope Food Cooperative, the narrator befriends a young Lebanese woman named Noor, who explains her biological father was not the man she had grown up believing was her father, and that her biological father and mother are back together. At a lecture later on, the narrator reveals he decided to become a poet at the age of seven on January 28, 1986, when the space shuttle Challenger exploded, killing all aboard. The narrator explains that even his family, who were politically opposed to President Ronald Reagan, were deeply touched by the address Reagan delivered about the disaster, in which the astronauts “slipped the surly bonds of Earth to touch the face of God”. The narrator himself was deeply...