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All the Letters I’ll Never Send
Last July, I wrote three letters in quick succession: the first to my ninth grade algebra teacher, the second to my ex-boyfriend’s mother, the third to a somewhat famous author. The letters were not...
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Read Anne Sexton’s Response to Her Worst-Ever Review
In the April 28th, 1963 edition of the New York Times Book Review, James Dickey—the author of Deliverance, and a poet who would be named the United States Poet Laureate in 1966—reviewed Anne Sexton’s...
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From Midcentury Confessional Poetry to Reality TV
Studies of confession—even offhand remarks on the subject—must, by custom, begin with a few sweeping claims about Confession in the West. No essay on personal poetry, no think-piece on memoir feels...
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Literature Without Writing: A Survey of Texts That Aren’t Texts
Black Elk Speaks, John Neihardt Before writing, there is speech. When words are just sound, the highest artistic achievement of language is music. Then Gilgamesh gets carved into tablets and our words...
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Latin America’s Answer to Karl Ove Knausgaard
“Do not read, as children do, to amuse yourself, or like the ambitious, for the purpose of instruction. No, read in order to live.” Gustave Flaubert Ricardo Piglia was an assiduous reader, that most...
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You Can Never Go Back: On Loving Children’s Books as an Adult
I’ve never gotten over growing up. I must’ve longed to grow up at some point, I suppose, fantasizing about unknown, illicit future pleasures as all kids do—but once I’d done it, I quickly wished I...
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Counting Feet: On Running and Poetic Meter
Two things have been occupying my mind of late: running, and poetic meter. They can both, more or less, be summarized as “counting feet.” I’ve been spending long days in Berlin’s Staats-Bibliothek with...
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Reclaiming a Beloved Writer from the Brink of Disappearance
In early March 1995 I wrote a letter to Paul Horgan and sent it off to Middletown, CT, where—following a polymathic career as a teacher, novelist, historian, biographer, short story writer, critic,...
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Charles Bukowski Wrote So Fast His Publisher Couldn’t Keep Up
It’s no news that Charles Bukowski was a one-of-a-kind writer: womanizer, boozer, Dirty Old Man, two-bit ignorant who couldn’t tell Hercules from Hitler, bar-room brawler, Shakespeare of the sewers,...
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We Still Need the Morality Lessons of Philip Pullman
Philip Pullman is uneasy about his work being characterized as “for children.” He balances the clarity of narrative demanded by younger readers with the intellectual complexity appreciated by older...
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Long Tables, Open Bottles, and Smoke: Hanging Out with Derek Walcott
I learned a good deal about poets and poetry from Joseph Brodsky, whose classes I audited in the 1970s in Ann Arbor and whose opinion on most anything I took as holy writ in those days. Joseph was a...
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Justice for Maggie: On George Eliot’s Most Underrated Heroine
In the first half of George Eliot’s novel Middlemarch (1871), perhaps one of the most illustrious novels of the modern era, the narrator opens a chapter by reporting the the goings-on of heroine...
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The Only Dissident Novel For Sale in Turkey
Since the failed coup of July 2016, Turkey’s president has been working overtime to silence his enemies and control what his supporters hear, see, and learn. He has purged the ministries and the...
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The Promise and Disappointment of Virtual Reality
Imagine that you and a group of friends are walking through a tunnel, carrying a variety of objects. A backpack. A vase. A toy spaceship. The cardboard cut-out of a dragon. The tunnel broadens, passing...
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Anne of Green Gables: Patron Saint of Girls Who Ask Too Many Questions
My first copy of Anne of Green Gables was an illustrated picture book, a Christmas gift from my parents when I was six or seven. The oversize blue hardcover did not contain the actual text of Lucy Maud...
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The Dangerous Lure of Writing For White Readers in an MFA
This essay was adapted from the keynote at NonfictioNOW, in Reykjavik, Iceland, June 2017. __________________________________ When I found out I was going to be a keynote for this conference I went...
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Beyond Lyric Shame: Ben Lerner on Claudia Rankine and Maggie Nelson
Language poetry—and to my mind the best Language poetry was written in prose—was a machine that ran on difficulty. Reading a prose poem deploying what Ron Silliman called “the new sentence” was...
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The Births and Deaths of Kathy Acker
It was while I was still living in Athens, Georgia in the 90s and attempting to teach myself how to be a poet that I saw my first books by Kathy Acker, prominently displayed in a place called...
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20 Baffling Omissions From the NY Times’ 100 Notable Books List
Earlier this week, the New York Times unveiled its annual list of 100 Notable Books. As was the case last year, some clearly notable books have been left off this list—in particular, the following 20...
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The New Bad Girls of Contemporary Literature
We love to categorize people and their behavior, referring to them in terms of “good” and “bad,” “likeable” and “unlikeable.” Often these categories help us to a space of a rudimentary understanding of...
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