A few years ago, a woman in Spain attempted to restore a nineteenth-century church fresco, but in doing so ruined it completely. The result is less Savior than surreal simian, the delicate portrait painted over with a crude, monstrous “face.” Since the election it has been hard to shake the feeling that reality has been made worse, unrecognizable, in precisely this way.
Ears on the Floor: Poetry of Witness in a Post-Truth Era Read More »
When I was seven years old, the INS raided the canyon behind my childhood home in San Diego. I remember how they pulled up onto our driveway and men emerged in uniforms with large guns.
Let It Begin with Me Read More »
“The concept of snapping and committing violence under pressure isn’t foreign to us, but the people who were snapping–namely, young children, including girls–surprised me.”
On “Pull Me Under”: An Interview with Kelly Luce Read More »
On September 30, I received an email from my neighbor that our apartment building had caught on fire.
“I’m not sure that Burn Lyrics is, strictly speaking, ‘in conversation with’ either Carson or Sappho. The model I have in mind is more like concomitant dimensions. I hope that a reader might experience a frisson of recognition, an emotional yet perhaps unplaceable feeling, when those dimensions overlap or communicate with one another.”
On “Burn Lyrics”: An Interview with Benjamin Landry Read More »
In 1872, Susan B. Anthony cast a ballot in the presidential election in which Ulysses S. Grant would win his second term in office. Nearly half a century before women would actually get the right to vote in this country, this was of course an illegal act, and one for which Anthony was ultimately arrested and tried.
The Only Question Left To Be Settled Now Read More »
“Jealousy requires an act of looking, and my characters spend a lot of time looking at what others have—or anyway, what they think others have—and sometimes making not-so-great decisions based on that misguided idea.”
“Say Something Nice About Me”: An Interview with Sara Schaff Read More »
Brigit’s poems are formalist in the best kind of way: as a materially textual revelation of the earth and the spirit in consort; of the prayers, stories, and songs by which we seek this consort; of “the realm of myth, archetype, fable, and metaphor,” as Merrill puts it, that lies beneath “the surface of personal experience.” But her poems don’t just recount this realm. She doesn’t simply read it from the old books. Hers is a constant vigilance, an onlooking so patient and steady that the world releases the secrets of its order.
Remembering Brigit Pegeen Kelly, 1951-2016 Read More »
“You’d find certain archetypes that would appear no matter what. For instance, the haunted merchant’s house in New York plays off the mythology of the unmarried woman, the spinster, as does the Winchester House. Things like this would crop up unexpectedly across the country, despite their radically different places and stories and cultures.”
On “Ghostland”: An Interview with Colin Dickey Read More »
At least when the monster exists in the world, we don’t need all this tiresome self-reflection. In politics, in Stranger Things, we know what we’re protecting, what we love (the townspeople! our way of life!) and we analyze the external enemy simply in order to defeat it.
What Haunts Us Now Read More »
