The Comfort of Writing Guides: On Benjamin Percy’s “Thrill Me”
About a year ago, I heard Benjamin Percy give a craft lecture in Seattle. The talk, “Making the Extraordinary Ordinary,” concerned blending literary and genre fiction.
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Into Obscurity, Poetically Speaking
I first found CD Wright’s poem “The Obscure Lives of Poets” back in February, and was afraid to get too close, as though examining it might blind me, or worse, put out the fire.
Resisting Temptations While Translating: An Interview with Margaret Jull Costa and Robin Patterson
Chronicle of the Murdered House is certainly Cardoso’s best-known work, and also a bold one, in that it is not the most accessible of books. So it is both an obvious starting point, and a difficult one. Perhaps that is why it has taken to so long to bring to readers in English.
In Bookstores Near You: Donika Kelly’s Bestiary: Poems
When Donika Kelly’s debut collection of poetry, Bestiary, was released barely one month ago, it came as the winner of the Cave Canem Poetry Prize and a long-listed nominee for the 2016 National Book Award. From page one, it’s obvious why.
Whose America? A Conversation with Hanif Willis-Abdurraqib on poetry after Trump
In the two weeks since Donald Trump’s election, people from around the country, and from all walks of life, have been debating each other online. How exactly did Trump get elected?
Remembering the Poetry of Leonard Cohen
Leonard Cohen, the Canadian poet, novelist and songwriter, died last week at the age of 82, after publicly stating to the press that he was ready to die. He gave warning that his time was coming, but still, I was not ready.
What comes through the fence: reading Paul Celan after the US election
There are so many traumas coming to the center of our political life now, and what I am attempting to say, through the hundred breakdowns of speech, is that there are places where language is undone. The horror of it is always there, lives in the breath and the street, the news and the document.
NOTES ON THE STATE OF VIRGINIA: Journey to the Center of an American Document, Queries XIX-XXII
In these sections of Notes on the State of Virginia, Jefferson concludes his meditation on American liberty with a pecuniary focus that seems strange at first. These four queries are about money.
Writ in Water: Reservation Round
In a space like this, when we talk about genre fiction, we are often talking about its limitations: its conventions, its shallowness, its easy accessibility, its (overly) familiar repetitions, its elastic distance behind the invisible but razor-wired line of the literary.