Columns
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Bouquet of Memoirs: A Conversation with Beth Ann Fennelly
“I know sometimes people find titles by looking at the titles of individual pieces, and they look for the most significant or biggest piece. And in this case, it was actually one of the slightest pieces, but that also seemed…
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The Taxonomy of Girlhood: Review of Susan L. Leary’s “More Flowers”
More Flowers interrogates how patriarchal authority persists even in its absence, transmitted through maternal caretaking rather than overt dominance. While an authoritative male figure is not present, the mother still governs by his rule, passing down restrictive and traditional expectations…
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“This Fraught and Gorgeous World”: A Conversation with Anna Lena Phillips Bell
“I’ve always loved the phrase might could—it’s very much part of the vernacular I grew up speaking and hearing. There’s both a sense of hope and a sense of resignation in it. When I was writing what became the book’s…
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The Call and Response of the Ensemble Novel: A Conversation with Emily Nemens
“I do think a lot about musical structures, and call and response. There is a common source to both writing and music—some of these patterns that we digest and metabolize as musicians about structure and callbacks. I love telling my…
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Obliteration and Authorship: On Hamid Ismailov’s “We Computers”
Jon-Perse’s vision for computer generated poetry can be summed up as a kind of obliteration of the author.
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Meaning in the Ice and “A Violence: Poems” by Paula Bohince
Like silence, violence is not quantifiable. Put the indefinite article “a” in front of it and the monolithic world of violence shutters into a reflective surface of infinite, biodiverse fragments. What counts as violence?
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Knowing the End before the Beginning: A Conversation with Jonathan Miles
The distinctions we make between ourselves and our animal brethren tend to be very self-flattering. We have unique skills and capabilities, to be sure, but they’re just fractionally different from those of many animals, and our primal drives are essentially…
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Four Poems
Kwikset That lock we kept on our doorwasn’t so much of a lock as a nonbinding contract I keptwith an outside world only vaguely complicitin our agreement— something we might forget aboutif one of us didn’t sign it every day—…
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A Backyard of One’s Own: The Meticulous Ecology of Cecily Parks’ “The Seeds”
The incisive precision of The Seeds’s assemblage cannot be overstated: if the collection is an ecosystem, its sections and sequences are habitats, and each poem is a haunt. The poems are divided into five sections, bookended by a hackberry, and…
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Distracting Self from Grief through Form: A Conversation with Ashley M. Jones
“I wanted to do a heroic crown of sonnets to try to encapsulate the bigness of his life, but also the bigness of his loss. That was a lot to deal with. So, knowing that I at least could focus…
