Berfrois

Eli S. Evans: Is That It

Eli S. Evans: Is That It

Thanks, Berfrois...

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Jessica Sequeira: Two Augurs

Jessica Sequeira: Two Augurs

Archaic, oracular and paradoxical ,  inspired by studies of occult philosophy yet destined for a wider readership unacquainted with these currents , this collection of poems by Olga Acevedo

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Ed Simon: VE Day 75 Years Later

Ed Simon: VE Day 75 Years Later

If the lesson from World War II can’t be that the Allies were unassailably good, it can still be that the Axis was unambiguously evil.

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Emily Ogden: Mind Games

Emily Ogden: Mind Games

A Greek soldier once said to me on a private bunk in a ferry boat, “You are a good whore.” Well, I mean to say. This was absurd. I had bedded him.

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Who is free from Melancholy?

Who is free from Melancholy?

Melancholy is a condition unsuited to a pandemic. Like ennui, it is an ailment born of stability. The strong light of catastrophe withers it.

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Cam Scott on Robert Glück

Cam Scott on Robert Glück

“In the 1430s, Margery Kempe wrote the first autobiography in English. She replaced existence with the desire to exist,” writes Robert Glück...

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Anandi Mishra: The Self in Quarantine

Anandi Mishra: The Self in Quarantine

I was just wetting my toes into the sands of self-isolation in Delhi, when a putrid smell came along, an estrangement within another estrangement.

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Poet Times

Poet Times

The poet is born in squalor, his first love. Some of the poet’s favorite words include seedy, shabby, seamy.

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In these days of solitude and waiting…

In these days of solitude and waiting…

Statue of Dietrich Bonhoeffer in Hamburg, Germany. via Flickr/KeokiSeu (cc) by Stephen R. Haynes Why did 13 people make their way to my campus on a dreary February evening in 2020 for a new class I was teaching on a long-dead German theologian called Dietrich Bonhoeffer? We obviously shared...

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Nicholas Rombes: X’ed Out and Vivarium

Nicholas Rombes: X’ed Out and Vivarium

Both X’ed Out and Vivarium assume an other world that leaks into the main frame world where most of the action happens...

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Julian Hanna: Do It Now

Julian Hanna: Do It Now

If you want to garden and you’re able, do it now. If you want revolution and you’re able, do it now...

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Eli S. Evans: The Writer vs. the Pandemic II

Eli S. Evans: The Writer vs. the Pandemic II

I am “working” from “home,” in bed, when I have a cough that may or may not be dry but is definitely not wet. My stomach drops...

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Rachel Howard: Midnight Sun

Rachel Howard: Midnight Sun

California has been ordered to shelter in place. And here we are, 50 miles from our home, buying chickens. A last act before lockdown.

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Eternity, Hell, Angels

Eternity, Hell, Angels

Current conversations about the essay—and there are many—emphasize the provisional, speculative nature of the genre, the suggestion of a test, a tryout.

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Albert Rolls: Pynchon in the Low Countries

Albert Rolls: Pynchon in the Low Countries

Martin Eve is able to demonstrate in “Historical Sources for Thomas Pynchon’s ‘Peter Pinguid Society’” that Pynchon consulted a single source...

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Eli S. Evans: The Writer vs. the Pandemic

Eli S. Evans: The Writer vs. the Pandemic

If you played an instrument before the pandemic, but so badly that it would not have occurred to you to publicly disseminate videos of yourself playing it...

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Advice for Isolated Writers

Advice for Isolated Writers

Welcome to the new order. It’s not going to be fun or easy. But maybe you finally can carve out time to finish (or begin) that novel. You can read and write poetry.

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Drying Up

Drying Up

It didn’t happen all at once. I didn’t wake up one morning to find myself unable to write creatively. For months, I could eke out a story or group of poems...

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Wager for Happiness

Wager for Happiness

In the summer or fall of 1943, La France libre, the London-based provisional government led by General Charles de Gaulle...

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