October 18, 2017
Me Too and the Trauma Narrative
I’ve spent the past days watching two little words that tell-and-don’t-tell so much wander, liberated at last, largely comma-free, through the raw expanse of shared trauma that is my Facebook-feed. […]
October 16, 2017
“THIS IS THE STORY OF HOW I GOT TO LIVE”: On Lynn Melnick & Surviving the Landscape
I don’t even know you. Sure, I do the most uncareful things when I’m miles from here. It’s all that freedom I don’t recognize. —Lynn Melnick, “Landscape with […]
October 11, 2017
Blade Runner 2049, Poetry, and Electric Sheep
In undertaking Blade Runner 2049, a sequel to Ridley Scott’s much-theorized 1982 cult classic Blade Runner, director Denis Villeneuve had some big shoes to fill. His shrewd move was […]
October 9, 2017
Unapologetically Stepping In: Lynn Melnick’s Landscape with Sex and Violence
I didn’t emerge well-trained into this savage vista because all the houseplants were succulent, and, while anyone could witness rot writ all over my blighted arrangement, no one stepped […]
September 30, 2017
On Atonement & The Year for which We Are Asking
On Yom Kippur, we ask that we are written into The Book of Life for one more year. And in thinking of The Book, I keep returning to this […]
September 21, 2017
This Rosh Hashanah, We Throw the Door Open
To go home, leave crumbs. When the wood circles you back here instead, let the lost and the impossible ripen in you, ripen and go. “What is Growing […]
September 15, 2017
Reading Toni Morrison’s Playing in the Dark After Charlottesville
As someone who teaches literature post-Charlottesville (and everything else), I felt it was an important time to revisit Toni Morrison’s Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination […]
September 8, 2017
Mix-Tape II: Through Neon Lens, Darkly
A month before Donald Trump won the election in 2016, Entropy Magazine ran poet and humorist Holly Burdorff’s experimental piece “What Spills Out When Torn in Two // Reality in […]
September 7, 2017
Remembering John Ashbery’s Time and Space
Vladimir Nabokov’s confession in Speak, Memory (1951) that he does not believe in time might have been more shocking if it had come earlier in literary history; by the modernist […]
September 6, 2017
Thinking about John Ashbery
It’s been heartening to see the many tributes online to John Ashbery, who died on Sunday at the age of ninety. Has anyone given to the our language what Ashbery […]
August 31, 2017
Strange & Endlessly Afoot at the Circle K
Imagine our future selves as the much-harder-to-follow laws of us. Because writing a new poem requires a future self, which is not the same thing as a new self […]
August 23, 2017
Charlottesville Fabulous
My big brother lives in Charlottesville. We grew up together in Groveport, Ohio, rode the bus with a girl whose dad was a Columbus cop, whose grandfather was a World […]