Blank Page Theory

At first I wanted to write only at night. The great romantic writers I admired wrote mostly in the witching hours. Can you imagine Kafka lugging his laptop to Starbucks at seven in the morning?
Read MoreThe YA serial came into its own in the 1980s…

If Christopher Pike’s YA novels were sold out at my local Crown Books, I was faced with the choice of either Sweet Valley High or The Baby-Sitters Club...
Read MoreGurped Out

On any given day, walking around the yard, one was almost certain to hear one prisoner ask another, “Hey, man, got any gurps?” I knew it had something to do with drugs...
Read MoreIt’s All Argentinian to Arturo Desimone

Have they clocked our nocturnal ways that bite at kleptomaniac clockhands in our capitals?
Read MorePeter Pans

Who or what is Peter Pan? Peter stands for a deep psychological desire in all of us to return to childhood and escape into an earlier, freer state of being...
Read MoreVictorian London’s Air of the Future

The Doom of the Great City imagines the entire population of London choked to death under a soot-filled fog. The story is told by the event’s lone survivor sixty years later...
Read MoreMore Absurdity Than Logic

Don’t we go to literature to find the logic that might displace the absurdity of our lives?
Read MoreThe Lyric’s Return in Black British Poetics

This essay considers some reasons for lyric’s return in black British poetics by first taking a broad look at the field, and then by attending to the work of several poets writing since the 1990s but publishing most visibly since the millennium...
Read MoreThe New Zhdanovshchina

This new world of ours, structured by the internet, is unrelentingly violent, as it is inimical to human freedom and human thriving...
Read MoreFar Sparklers

Tonight I walked under the stars through the snow & stopped & looked at my far sparklers & heard the voice of the wind so slight & pure & deep as if it were the sound of the stars themselves revolving...
Read MoreThe Appearance of Goodness

There are many social-media-savvy people who are choking on sanctimony and lacking in compassion, who can fluidly pontificate on Twitter about kindness but are unable to actually show kindness...
Read MoreL.M. Montgomery’s Journals

Through all those years of journal entries, Lucy Maud Montgomery was always intelligent, often funny and never boring. I wanted to know what she’d say next...
Read MoreMarian Janssen on Carolyn Kizer

Carolyn Kizer, feminist poet and founding editor of Poetry Northwest, became the first Program Director for Literature at the National Endowment for the Arts in 1966...
Read MoreThe tea should be strong. For a pot holding a quart, if you are going to fill it nearly to the brim, six heaped teaspoons would be about right...
Read MoreThe thing about new blooms is that they tend to bleed— / Those petals birthed / hugging close / that come warmer weather are tricked into jumping away...
Read MoreI spent a good part of my childhood at home staring outside my bedroom window, following the trail of planes approaching the nearby Paris airport in the sky from my banlieue. I envied the passengers...
Read MoreThe tea should be strong. For a pot holding a quart, if you are going to fill it nearly to the brim, six heaped teaspoons would be about right...
Read MoreThe thing about new blooms is that they tend to bleed— / Those petals birthed / hugging close / that come warmer weather are tricked into jumping away...
Read MoreI spent a good part of my childhood at home staring outside my bedroom window, following the trail of planes approaching the nearby Paris airport in the sky from my banlieue. I envied the passengers...
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