I keep fighting off awareness that my imaginative life has been stuck in a rut for a long time. When one dismisses specific contemporary volumes of poetry, one can blame […]
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Scene 1 A small, stuffy bedroom in a boardinghouse called the Palace, window thrown open to the desert night. Two men have reunited after meeting nearly a decade ago when […]
Read MoreI begin this review of Kazim Ali’s latest book, Sukun: New and Selected Poems, while attempting to process the daily news coming out of Palestine. I am thinking of Ali’s […]
Read MoreIn the first chapter of The Porch: Meditations on the Edge of Nature, Charlie Hailey defines the porch as a place of meeting and exchange: “Porch is that place where […]
Read More“Well, it was a sort of bet,” recalled Tom Phillips, decades later. “I was in a furniture shop with a friend, R. B. Kitaj, another artist, and I said, ‘the […]
Read MoreEarly in the pandemic, those of us raising school-aged children found them suddenly everywhere, all the time, closer than they’d been since infancy. It was as if my oldest child’s […]
Read MoreCarrie Mae Weems’s 1997 photograph series Not Manet’s Type presents a series of nude self-portraits accompanied by text. The fourth image in the sequence shows Weems’s reflection in a round […]
Read MoreOur toys are talking to us. Fulfilling the childhood fantasy of dolls that return affection, speak back, or even come to life, recent films have seized upon the timeless fascination […]
Read MoreElizabeth Arnold’s Wave House reveals a literary intelligence so fiercely independent and yet so central to my sense of contemporary literature that I’m tempted to use the book to stage […]
Read MoreIn her debut novel, Jackal, Erin E. Adams begs readers to look at the horrors lurking behind the smiles of the residents of Johnstown, Pennsylvania, and the terrors hiding just […]
Read MoreThe subtitle of Peach Pit makes it clear what this fiction anthology promises: an array of portrayals of “unsavory” women who misbehave, who refuse to fit into the neat tropes […]
Read MoreStephanie Burt’s sixth poetry collection, We Are Mermaids, touches on the surface of things and slips below into the saltiest depths and touches there too. Poems discuss the ways letters touch each […]
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