Reading On the Road
It took four years for a glioblastoma, a brain cancer that has a median survival rate of fourteen months, to take my mom’s life. It took me those same four years to read Jack Kerouac’s famous work.
Blog
After the Winter by Guadalupe Nettel, translated by Rosalind Harvey
Guadalupe Nettel’s writing, in an excellent translation by Rosalind Harvey, is spare, occasionally eerie and always elegant.
T-Shirts, Deportation, and the Epiphanies of Clemens Meyer in Mexico City
What is new and what is vestigial? What trauma is passed down and what trauma can be left behind? While some might consider Texas a kind of photo negative of the former East Germany, I think of those two states as simulacrum in many ways.
Women Grieving Women
Recent works by Sarah Perry, Michelle Zauner, and Sara Nović demonstrate how, with time, they were able to take their pain and paralysis and forge something beautiful.
The Troubled Utopias of Ursula K. Le Guin
Le Guin’s “The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas” ultimately seems to at once embody and expose the limits of utopian thinking.
How Do You Outwit Writing in Writing?
Anne Boyer’s collection of essays, fables and manifestos collected from over a decade of her work, serve as both a scathing critique of and a brilliant testament to daily existence under the physical realities of oppressive structures.
Human Hours by Catherine Barnett
As Barnett unfolds for readers the hours of a particular human life, she simultaneously asks readers to examine their own hours.
Wisława Szymborska’s Influence on Poetry
Poetry, Polish poet Wisława Szymborska contends, is the operative exercise of not knowing.
The Role of Images in Teju Cole’s Blind Spot
As is painting, so is poetry: the connection between the two cannot be denied, but its nature and significance have been heavily debated. Is poetry a verbal painting? Is painting silent poetry?