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 29, 2017
The Gothic Literary Roots of Darren Aronofsky’s mother!
Even if you never laid eyes on Darren Aronofsky’s mother!, you could still get lost for days surfing the labyrinthine links of think pieces that have erupted since it hit […]
September 26, 2017
Returning to New Houses We Rebuild Together
Yesterday, you began this essay with: She bears the wood and the forgotten knowledge of the wood, carries its many names, a weight that brings the poet no unity. And […]
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 […]
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 24, 2017
Formal Innovation and Stephen Kampa’s “Another Way of Breaking the Pen-tameter”
When I read a new essay like Stephen Kampa’s “Another Way of Breaking the Pen-tameter,” which directly engages with a number of the directions I’ve explored here at the Kenyon […]
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 […]
August 14, 2017
My Conservative Past
Maybe I was reading too much T. S. Eliot. Maybe it was the gnawing sense of living in a world out of control—but when has the world ever been in […]