I began this week by writing about compost…and that, if you’re just breathing a sigh of relief, is still to come, probably next week. Compost, however, has been preempted by word of a minor scuffle back in the northeast, of the type all too familiar in academic circles. It’s given me cause to reopen Ovid’s…
What reaches for the sun. What turns green panes flat to the zenith. A green order in the bay window, quatrefoil. Egg-toothed cotyledon. ~ There’s something to know and it can’t be known and I have to know it. It wakes me up in the morning, shivers me through the day. My soul fleeth unto…
Disclaimer: For those who haven’t experienced David Simon’s HBO series The Wire, you should probably tune out now and hit up your Netflix. Same thing goes to those Wire fans who haven’t finished Season Four. I don’t want to spoil the narrative arc of the season for you. * In my vision, Michael Lee is…
There may be no writer more deserving of massive attention than Matthew Zapruder, and, thankfully, 2010 seems to have been the year he got caught up to. His latest, Come On All You Ghosts, was named in all sorts of year-end lists, and rightly so: the man’s writing some of the best poetry anywhere, and…
Guest post by Fan Wu I was awakened at 3:36 a.m. by my two-year-old daughter’s crying. I went to her room and lay down beside her, as I always do when she wakes up in the middle of the night. Half an hour later she fell sleep, while I was wide awake. I thought about…
Guest post by Bridget Lowe Most of us wrote them in grade school, our names printed in large letters down the left margin and traced over with marker, our early views of ourselves summed up in a handful of lively adjectives. A few years ago, when leaving for graduate school, I received a particularly excellent…
Guest post by Alicia Jo Rabins There’s nothing like those years when you don’t yet have what you are working for. There’s a lot of freedom because there’s so much possibility. You need friends who are working for something, too…Everything starts with an all-night conversation. Find a spiritual twin to walk the city streets…
Guest post by Peter B. Hyland In book five of The Odyssey, the sea goddess Ino comes to the aid of a storm-tossed Odysseus. She emerges from the waves and loans him her veil, a talisman that ensures he will arrive in one piece on the island of Scheria, his last stop before returning home…
Guest post by James Arthur I’d like to think that although poetic styles change, as they should, the themes of poetry are more durable: that poets will keep writing love poems, for example, as long as romantic love exists, and writing elegies as long as there is death, because poetry reflects human experience, and the…
Spring 2024 - Print