August 22, 2017
Patricia Smith’s “Skinhead”
In light of the white hate and violence on recent display in Charlottesville, as the (still living) history of white supremacy and white nationalism rose up in (was it ever […]
August 22, 2017
Thirteen Ways of Looking at a President Looking at an Eclipse
(1) In the eye of the eclipse, he sought the loyalty of Comey, the bears of Betsy DeVos, and the phantom tapping of his own phones. The sun: Anoint […]
August 16, 2017
To Mi Ciela, My Lion’s Laugh-Love, My Little Panpipe
Dear niece. Dear eight-year-old asker of pointed questions and WHY and WHY again. I wish I had answers for you today. I wish you lived closer or that I could […]
July 31, 2017
Mix-Tape I: Sometimes You Choose Never
In yesterday’s essay, I wrote in part on the difficulties of coming back daily from the noise, especially when it’s not just noise, but policies and public discourse that affect us […]
July 30, 2017
Dear Future People
how angels would walk the ocean if they wanted to walk. They don’t. They hover. —”Water at Night,” Marianne Boruch —or did you get past us, just far […]
July 26, 2017
NSFW: On “Hysterical Literature,” Leaves of Grass, and the Sexy Reading Movement
Somewhere in the foggy realm between performance art and porno, on a YouTube channel where a poem drives up page views, a woman reads aloud from a paperback book. She […]
July 21, 2017
Love in the Time of Disconnect(ing)
You might get out through all the waves and rocks Into the middle of the poem to touch them But when you’ve tried the blessed water long Enough to […]
July 4, 2017
Some Thoughts on Independence Day
Lately, for reasons I can’t really name, I’ve been reading about the Enlightenment in an old textbook that’s been lying around for years. It brings back the excitement of college […]
June 24, 2017
Summer in the City (Part 1)
It’s the first real day of summer—which is rarely the first official day of summer but rather a time in which the schedules of you and seven other people magically […]
June 18, 2017
A Letter to My Father on Father’s Day
—and there was a young ram who’d climb to the top of the mountain with the rest of his family, and they were wild and belonged to no one […]
June 3, 2017
Thea Brown’s “Principia” (Poetry in Public: Part IV)
Earlier this year, I spent some time thinking about the interplay between hearing poets read aloud (the experience of voice and embodied presence as event) and encountering their work on […]
May 29, 2017
On Race and Recent Events
Some guys on the football team took one of their teammates—I’ll say his name was Ned—out to the field, got some medical tape out of the locker room, and […]