The subtle mark of Smith’s excellence is how each poem arrives where it’s at—meeting both itself and the world, inhabiting them at once and entirely.
Loving the Good and No-Good Bones of It: A Review of Maggie Smith’s “Good Bones” Read More »
“All of these are experiments in figuring out actually how close these topics are. I make them appear much closer than they appear normally. Things that we compartmentalize. Things that we consider distant and close, either spatially or in time.”
On “Unlikely Designs”: An Interview with Katie Willingham Read More »
“It’s becoming especially important for men to actively work toward envisioning and embodying versions of masculinity distinct from the patriarchal manhood reinforced by much of American culture.”
“The Maze Becomes Your Life”: An Interview with Alex McElroy Read More »
“The politics of visibility in urban space are immensely complex and intersectional; we’re all out there navigating the streets as best we can, and hoping to get something out of it.”
The Subversive Flâneuse: An Interview with Lauren Elkin Read More »
“Poems are often these very strange moans. These very impossible efforts toward the innermost pangs. Somehow, the trying to go there gives me hope. To reach down and into. To make your whole language and your whole body move that way.”
A List of Further Possibilities: An Interview with Chen Chen Read More »
“The complexities of the human spirit intrigue me. Sometimes we believe we are working towards one goal when in fact we are up to something else entirely. I think of these as shadow rooms in the homes of our souls.”
On “The Child Finder”: An Interview with Rene Denfeld Read More »
I had just enough experience working with teenagers to know they’re merciless bullshit detectors. I also remembered how my classmates and I had treated some of our teachers—teachers who would now be my colleagues.
The public nature of the hate is critical to its Americanizing function. Shouting hate slogans, hateful slurs, is our form of communist denunciation and coerced betrayals of loved ones — only, instead of marking Party membership, by offering up traitors to a cause, capitalists, enemies of state — we signal we are part of the majority by verbalizing hate, demonization, exclusion.
Safe: A Meditation on Charlottesville and Beyond Read More »
With all the weight of future uncertainties — predictions of ever greater social despair, economic collapse, another world war, concerns for the end of natural resources and therefore the wildernesses that sustain all of us — Dan Gerber’s Particles: New and Selected Poems is a deeply human meditation more timely and timeless than could have ever imagined.
The Future Every Moment: A Review of Dan Gerber’s “Particles” Read More »
“Music, the visual arts, and, predominantly, the writing of books have all been enduring interests, and the arrangement of these essays — long, brief, long, brief, long — is meant to mirror those concerns.”
On “Curiouser and Curiouser”: An Interview with Nicholas Delbanco Read More »
