How does an essay comes to its final shape? What’s the morphology of nonfiction’s popular form? Over at the Ploughshares blog, E. V. De Cleyre dissects works by Ander Monson, Claudia Rankine, Eula Biss, Leslie Jamison, and Maggie Nelson to get to core of the essay’s structure.


![National Poetry Month: “WHEN PRAYER DIDN’T AWAY THE GAY, MY DAD TAUGHT ME HOW TO PLAY DOOM ON THE FAMILY COMPUTER [Golden Shovel]”](https://therumpus.net/wp-content/uploads/2026/04/pic-Ty-Raso.jpeg)
