I was fifteen when I decided I would make myself appreciate Emily Dickinson. One summer afternoon I sat down on my bedroom floor with a small book of Dickinson poems I’d been given as a gift and a dictionary. I’d never looked up so many words (I was not yet a literary girl). I began…
At its most basic, a literary editor’s job is a series of “either/or” decisions, or a long and hopefully-not-very-drunken game of “would you rather”: the editor takes a stack of poems/stories/essays and weighs them against each other to choose what gets published and what does not. This is the most-fundamental-possible description of the job: editors…
With Easter and Passover falling early in April, Poetry Month began in full earnest later than usual here in New York City, about the middle of the month. While some continue to wait their turns in line to decry the end of poetry in these United States, the sheer number of poetry events around NYC…
Clover Adams: A Gilded and Heartbreaking Life Natalie Dykstra Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, February 2012 336 pages $26.00 Clover Adams, best known as the genteel and witty wife of nineteenth century writer Henry Adams, was a hobbyist photographer who killed herself at age forty-two by drinking her chemical developer. However, while Henry kept Clover’s half-full vial…
Apparently, E.L. Doctorow once taught a course that only had one book on the syllabus. The class read the one book and decided from there what the next book should be. If it was Jane Eyre, somebody might then suggest The Wide Sargasso Sea, which was a prequel and written by another writer at a…
Up to the age of four, as my mother testified, I told only the truth, but after that I must have come to my senses – Marina Tsvetaeva I made an Easter quiche yesterday, and as I worked I thought about Marina Tsvetaeva, what I could tell of her that couldn’t be found in Wikipedia….
Gatekeeper, seasons wait for your nod. / Gatekeeper, you held your breath, / made the summer go on and on.—Feist Here’s a confession, Ploughshares readers: I’m a musical dinosaur. I have an unabashed love for Green Day and Counting Crows, and I’ve listened to Wu Tang Clan’s 36 Chambers almost weekly for eight years. If…
A Land More Kind Than Home Wiley Cash William Morrow, April 2012 $24.99 320 pages I don’t want to obscure the issue here, so I will be brief: A Land More Kind Than Home is a book you will be excited to read—that is, if you’re still in this game for some good old-fashioned storytelling….
You can get into Half Moon pose in any number of ways, but here’s the sequence I like best: 1. From down dog, lift your right leg, inhale. 2. Step the leg between your hands into a low lunge, exhale. 3. Rise up into Warrior I, inhale. 4. Windmill open into Warrior II, exhale. 5….
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