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 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 […]
October 5, 2017
Interview with T Clutch Fleischmann
T Clutch Fleischmann is a reviews editor at Punctuate, a nonfiction editor at DIAGRAM, a contributing editor at EssayDaily, and a nonfiction professor at Columbia College Chicago. AYLA MAISEY: As […]
October 2, 2017
YA Roundup: E. Katherine Kottaras on Writing, Teaching, and Being Brave
Katherine Kottaras is originally from Chicago, and now she writes and teaches in the Los Angeles area. She holds an M.A. in English from the University of California, Irvine and teaches […]
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 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 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 5, 2017
New Poems by Oliver de la Paz and Danez Smith
Two new poems that have moved me most deeply recently are Oliver de la Paz’s “Autism Screening Questionnaire – Speech and Language Delay” in the July/August 2017 issue of Poetry and […]
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 30, 2017
On Living in the Moment
I’m sick of everybody telling me to live in the moment, but I get it. Why do we insist upon these ideals, extremes that don’t exist, a whole society built […]
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 […]