Films and novels usually portray alien invasions, not simply as instances of tribal aggression on the part of such phrenological curiosities as the Klingons in Star Trek or the Sith Lords in Star Wars, but as evacuations from dying planets.
Read MoreLiving in rural Vermont, I enjoy proximity to wilderness, though I observe its sickness at close range. In spring, my family marks the return of swallows and red-winged blackbirds on the barn door.
Read MoreThe question is not whether humans are on a crash course with misery and extinction but how we as individuals relate to our membership in a species and chart a path for ourselves between now and our personal demise.
Read Moreby Tammy Ho Lai-Ming It came to me as an idea for how the PRC can explain away future disappearances of dissidents: Make them volunteer on Chinese Central Television to show their patriotism by sailing the South China Sea. Then when they never come back, are never heard from again, say they have vanished in…
Read MoreBishop’s letters to her psychiatrist are newsy and notational. One begins with a friend surprising her “with a birthday cak[e] and some mimosa” and concludes with a hairstyling appointment before dinner with Randall Jarrell.
Read MoreI think of you often –
You, you, you, as if you are uncommon.
Now in sex I see you – the
People tell us that Art makes us love Nature more than we loved her before; that it reveals her secrets to us; and that after a careful study of Corot and Constable we see things in her that had escaped our observation.
Read MoreSummer is when we don’t have to get up in the morning, or even the afternoon. Summer is when we insist on ice-cold beer to chill our body cavity, especially the spleen.
Read MoreThe earth refrains, but the voice exceeds.
The voice sweetens. The voice subsides.
Drawing on the work of English philosopher Nina Power and research into the techniques of crowd control, Australian artists Amy Spiers and Catherine Ryan have created a satirical work amplifying the “camp” aesthetics found within the organized policing of public spaces.
Read MoreLines and sentences: even now, nonfiction—including nonfiction by poets—is approached by readers, and sometimes by writers, chiefly as information, argument, or anecdote.
Read MoreValerie sees herself reflected in the varnish
and does not think about inheritance.
She knows that what she wants.
From London Review of Books: Like his hero Robert Graves, Hughes tirelessly pursued the White Goddess, or the Goddess of Complete Being as he called her in his study of Shakespeare, both in his imagination and in the forms that she assumed in the women whom he met and slept with. Few, it seems, took much…
Read MoreWriters as varied as Samuel Johnson, Charles Dickens, and Mary McCarthy would have been outraged to be called anything other than professionals, and when you push past Mark Twain’s most renowned books, you find a lot of writing that did little more than spin off from his celebrity.
Read MoreWhether voiced in the first, second or third person, I take the stories that Masha Tupitsyn tells about her person to be selectively true.
Read MoreAs I read postwar British poetry fully, I became less enamoured with the Movement tones of Phillip Larkin or Donald Davie and reviled their small, digestible, miserable artifacts of everyday British life.
Read MoreOn October 16, 1650, the General Court of Boston summoned the town executioner. Like his name, the executioner’s thoughts as he made his way to the marketplace that afternoon, far from the gallows at Boston Common, remain lost to history.
Read MoreHe had just broken up with her and felt free, yet horny. Felt kind of happy, yet replete—though he didn’t know what replete meant and he’d left her the dictionary.
Read MoreIn the resurgent ‘field’ of lyrical British nature writing, a prosaic form given to delight in the relationship of language and landscape, to relish and revel in the world and in words, Robert MacFarlane is one of the leading lights.
Read MoreThe “Viy” is a monstrous creation of popular fancy. It is the name which the inhabitants of Little Russia give to the king of the gnomes, whose eyelashes reach to the ground.
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