How do we begin to comment on the legacies, dreams, and stories of our ancestors? How could we not comment? What if we never knew a grandparent or ancestor personally […]
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What is the sonnet’s relationship to place? Phillis Levin, in The Penguin Book of the Sonnet, defines the genre through spatial terms: “The sonnet is a monument of praise, a […]
Read MoreSaretta Morgan’s Alt-Nature opens with these lines: “I want to wake every morning into love, / where love is the question of how I’m going to help you get free, […]
Read MoreIn Averno, Louise Glück’s poetic engagement with the Persephone myth, she writes: “the tale of Persephone / . . . should be read // as an argument between the mother […]
Read More“ ‘Communication’ is a registry of modern longings,” writes media theorist John Durham Peters in Speaking Into the Air: A History of the Idea of Communication. “The term evokes a utopia […]
Read MoreThe opening pages of Lindsey Harding’s Pilgrims 2.0 introduce a world that is familiar, but slightly off-kilter. A cruise ship is being prepared to set sail, only the purpose of […]
Read MoreToday in China the events of 1989 in Tiananmen Square are a taboo subject. They’re not taught in textbooks or memorialized in museums. Many young people don’t even know about […]
Read MoreElysha Chang’s debut novel, A Quitter’s Paradise (recently released in paperback), is populated by people who hold back—people who have made a tactic of restraint so that they might harbor […]
Read MoreIn February, the Association of Writers and Writing Programs held its annual conference in Kansas City, Missouri. Like so many writers with a first book newly published, I wanted to […]
Read MoreA trace is a small, but non-negligible amount of a thing implying a larger amalgam of it elsewhere. A trace is a presence, however miniscule, that points away from itself […]
Read MoreCheat with the wrong woman, and you may find a bunny boiling in your kitchen. Such is the enduring legacy of 1987’s Fatal Attraction and fount of the shorthand for […]
Read MoreBoth of Alison Rumfitt’s novels open with a content warning. As well as flagging potentially distressing material, these warnings function as upfront statements of Aboutness. “Tell Me I’m Worthless is […]
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