October 26, 2018
Re-Reading “Anne of Green Gables” as an Adult
In Anne of Green Gables, L.M. Montgomery explores how the style of the writing and the ideology of the characters form the atmosphere of a literary work. This focus on […]
October 26, 2018
On Character Names
Picking a character name is often as hard as writing the first line of a new novel or story—the kind of specific and essential task that often halts any momentum […]
October 25, 2018
E.M. Forster on Fantasy and Prophecy
There is a strange distinction made in the later chapters of E.M. Forster’s Aspects of the Novel, a collection of lectures the author gave at Cambridge in 1927. I’ve already […]
October 22, 2018
Clifton, Pain, and Poetry
If you haven’t read Lucille Clifton’s “Wishes for Sons” before, you might assume from the title that it’s a poem about hoping for sons – a mother’s prayerful request for a […]
October 22, 2018
VERVE {IN} VERSE: IN CONVERSATION WITH MONICA LEWIS
Note: Verve {in} Verse is my new poet-focused feature here at The Kenyon Review in which I converse with poets about their work and interests both on and off […]
October 17, 2018
W.D. Snodgrass’s “Heart’s Needle”
With their radically revealing autobiographical tone and their excavation of trauma, the poems in W.D. Snodgrass’s collection, Heart’s Needle, are undoubtedly confessional. What’s interesting about the poems is that this […]
October 15, 2018
Was Philip Roth a White Male Author?
It’s been four months now since Philip Roth died, long enough in our fast-paced media world that all the eloquent and moving obituaries have largely dissolved into a broader consensus […]
October 13, 2018
Where’s Papa going with that axe?
As part of my work at Cleveland Public Library, I recently had the pleasure of interviewing Melissa Sweet, the author and illustrator of Some Writer! The Story of E.B. White. Sweet […]
October 10, 2018
William Carlos Williams’s “Paterson”
If Ezra Pound’s and T.S. Eliot’s project in the Cantos and The Waste Land is, in Patersonian terms, to pull “the disparate together to clarify and compress,” then Williams’s project […]
October 8, 2018
On The English Patient
Last week, a piece called “The Movie Assassin” made the rounds on social media, part personal essay on the struggles of being a movie reviewer, part analysis of our society’s […]
October 4, 2018
Hume, Locke, Rawls, and the Roots of Social Justice
In this time so full of social justice questions, I decided to go back to a grad school textbook, Social Justice (edited by Mathew Clayton and Andrew Williams), to get a […]
October 2, 2018
Poetry for People Who Hate Poetry – October
This is a love story. This is the story that led me here, writing to you about how and why I fell in love with poetry, and what I think […]