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Destruction Modes: Sueyeun Juliette Lee’s Solar Maximum
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Destruction Modes: Sueyeun Juliette Lee’s Solar Maximum

Solar Maximum Sueyeun Juliette Lee Futurepoem, Winter 2015 128 pp, $18 “Perhaps we continue in the wake of a disaster we hardly marked,” runs the last sentence of Sueyeun Juliette Lee’s endnotes for Solar Maximum. Or, the last sentence could be the italicized incomplete fragment: “((when the sun disappears” ending the title poem – an…

Tracing Literary Family Trees: An Interview with Mark Wunderlich
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Tracing Literary Family Trees: An Interview with Mark Wunderlich

Mark Wunderlich is a poet from the Midwest living in Hudson Valley, teaching at Bennington College. He’s received many fellowships, including those from the National Endowment for the Arts, the MacDowell Colony, and the Bread Loaf Writers Conference. Megan Mayhew Bergman interviewed him for Ploughshares on craft, place, and essential reading for the new reader of…

Round-Down: New Lamb Novel to Launch Exclusively on App

Round-Down: New Lamb Novel to Launch Exclusively on App

There is no question that e-books have seen a surge of popularity in recent years, and that many titles have taken advantage of this form to reach more, and new, readers. The launch of a new app, Metabook, might represent the next step in the rise of digital bookselling. Metabook, which launched on March 18, is, according to its…

The keystone of a structure.
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Morphology of the Essay: Ander Monson, Claudia Rankine, Eula Biss, Leslie Jamison, & Maggie Nelson

According to Wikipedia, a keystone is “used figuratively to refer to a central element of a larger structure […] that locks the other elements in place and allows the whole to be self-supporting.” With a stone archway, the form is inherent, or predetermined. First, there is the abutment, then vertical supports, then voussoirs, and finally,…

Three red wheelbarrows leaning against the wall of a house.

Concretizing the enemy

Words have always coveted pictures for how immediately they can stir us. I think of the photograph of the South Vietnamese child who’d been sprayed by napalm. No word alive can match it. It was the photo on the cover of every magazine in 1972, which “probably did more to increase the public revulsion against…

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The Best Short Story I Read in a Lit Mag This Week: “In Which Godzilla Questions Where His Life Is Going” by Josiah Meints

Godzilla has been a mainstay in popular culture since the 1950s, when he was conceived as a metaphor for the nuclear age and the new level of mass destruction introduced. Josiah Meints, in the story “In Which Godzilla Questions Where His Life Is Going” (The Collapsar) reimagines the famous monster suffering from the ills of…

Deliberate Accidents of Discovery: The Trouble With Finding New Latina/o Writers

Deliberate Accidents of Discovery: The Trouble With Finding New Latina/o Writers

In an exercise of radical honesty I’ll share this with you: I almost always find great new Latina/o writing by accident. I think part of this is my pell-mell strategy of finding new books (at literary events, on coffee tables, etc.) though part of it can be attributed to my literary blind spots as well…