Genre: Reviews

Ecological poetry is at its most potent not when it explicates its cultural or historical milieu, but when it stages its own inability to do so. Or at least this is the stance of some of the major academic texts …

The first time I saw fireflies, I squinted to make sure I wasn’t imagining things. They twinkled in a tree outside my friend’s home in Princeton, New Jersey, flashing on and off to their own rhythm. Closing the car door …

We live in an age suspicious of beauty. And why not? Aesthetic matters can feel like distractions and luxuries in light of the more pressing concerns of morality and social relations: friendship, atrocity, divorce, the rise of the authoritarian character, …

He who saves a nation violates no law.

—Donald J. Trump, plagiarizing the character   
    Napoleon, in Rod Steiger’s Waterloo (1970)

They boast that America is the “cradle of liberty;” if it is, I fear they have rocked the child …

For the past few years, I have been engaged in an intense argument with myself. This argument reached a climax last May, a few moments after I saw the film I Saw the tv Glow at the E Street Cinema …

Today’s classrooms are battlegrounds for political and cultural conflicts. Are teachers prepared to serve on the front lines? Despite being set at a school, Lau Yee-Wa’s debut novel Tongueless provides few glimpses of Hong Kong’s classrooms. When it does, the …

Joyelle McSweeney’s Death Styles does what poems ought to do—attempt to give us experience, the derivative of event, the lines that represent acceleration in describing the actual speedometer markings. It’s the job of a poet to pull us out through …

One does not need to understand the world to artistically express it. In fact, it seems that often the latter occurs in the terrifying moments when the former is revealed to be impossible. The inevitability of artistic expression thus, more …

When my children were toddlers, they enjoyed a lift-the-flap book by author and illustrator Karen Katz called Where Is Baby’s Mommy? I found the title both amusing and alarming. Why did Mommy leave Baby on his own, searching inside, behind, …