John D’Agata, visionary champion of the essay and master anthologizer, sees the lyric form “partake of the poem in its density and shapeliness, it’s distillation of ideas and musicality of language.” He also sees it as unbound to conventional notions of truth. Writing for Harper’s, Elaine Blair critiques the genre-bending, exploratory practices of writers like David Shields, Anne Carson, Lydia Davis, Karl Ove Knausgaard, and Maggie Nelson. She leaves us with the question, “Can everything be filtered through the talking ‘I’?”
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