April 30, 2019
“Beyond the self”: A Conversation with Deborah Landau
Deborah Landau’s fourth book of poems, Soft Targets, is out this spring. Her previous collections are The Uses of the Body and The Last Usable Hour, both Lannan Literary Selections from Copper Canyon […]
April 29, 2019
Public by Varying Degrees: Understanding Audience in Relation to Emily Dickinson’s Artistic Subject
Introduction Emily Dickinson’s attitude toward the literary marketplace has been widely contested by critics, who portray her as both shy poetess and self-aware genius in search of literary immortality. Given […]
April 28, 2019
“An artistic harmonious balance between the reader’s mind and the author’s mind”: Vladimir Nabokov’s Literary Criticism as a Performance of Reading Practices
Introduction All too often, readers approach a writer’s forays into literary criticism as a source of insight about that individual’s tastes, aesthetic predispositions, and theoretical assumptions about literature. This type […]
April 26, 2019
“Silences cultivate a kind of cognitive dance between reader and poem”: A Conversation with Major Jackson
Major Jackson is the author of four books of poetry, including Roll Deep (2015), Holding Company (2010), Hoops (2006), and Leaving Saturn (2002), which won the Cave Canem Poetry Prize for a first book of poems. He is […]
April 25, 2019
Publisher Spotlight: Leland Cheuk of 7.13 Books
A MacDowell Colony and Hawthornden Castle Fellow, Leland Cheuk is the author of three books, most recently, NO GOOD VERY BAD ASIAN, forthcoming from C&R Press in September 2019. His […]
April 23, 2019
Villanelle of the Grasses
for the victims of the bombings in Sri Lanka, Easter 2019 The crepitation of grass seeds sprouting is the stir of green emanation — that’s the underwriting of a grassland […]
April 21, 2019
Jordan Peele’s Us Exposes America’s Shadow Self
This is the first in my new series, American Gothic: Investigating Horror, Ghosts, Monsters, & Haunted Houses. Stay tuned for more… After Jordan Peele’s movie Us introduces the Wilson family […]
April 21, 2019
After the Cathedral Fire
It was astonishing to see the news coverage, last week, of the Notre Dame Cathedral fire in Paris. In many ways it was heartening, all of that attention to a […]
March 20, 2019
Free Villanelle Against White Supremacists Co-opting Dylan Thomas’s ‘Do not go gentle into that good night’
Lines taken out of context can make darkness burn For those who want to burn the world, but darkness Is their slow burn, white lies their eruption. And when leaflets […]
March 13, 2019
“Dark comedy, violence, and haunted irony”: A Conversation with Christina Milletti
Christina Milletti’s novel Choke Box: a Fem-Noir won the Juniper Prize for Fiction and is forthcoming from University of Massachusetts Press in March 2019. Her fiction, articles, and reviews have […]
March 8, 2019
The Pope, the Imam, and Religious Pluralism
When I was fourteen, growing up in southern Indiana in the wake of the sixties, and fired by a desire for spiritual pursuits, I took lessons in Transcendental Meditation. It […]
February 28, 2019
“At the mercy of language”: A Conversation with Elizabeth A.I. Powell
Elizabeth A.I. Powell is the author of The Republic of Self, a New Issue First Book Prize winner, selected by C.K. Williams. Her second book of poems, Willy Loman’s Reckless […]