Columns
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Walking as a Pastime: Jason Allen-Paisant’s “Thinking with Trees”
Despite his struggle to assert himself, to feel belongingness in his adopted home, the poet concludes the collection with defiance and hope. In “Fear of Men,” he questions whether he must imagine “the trees dark at night” or “silhouettes rising,…
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The First Book: Eliana Ramage
‘You will write other novels…’ I find it affirming because (1) it quiets the worry that the first book has to say or hold everything, which no book can or should, (2) the word write.”
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Autobiomythography or Attending to What Memoir Excises: A Conversation with Lana Lin
My artistic practice includes making films, writing, and visual art. It’s driven by the same kinds of concerns around race, identity, and self-expression—and what it means to speak or to say something. In an interview [about] Dorothy, a publishing project,…
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Three Poems
my pussy hurts. Like it’s been kicked. Cunt feels too tough. It’d never admit to feeling pain. Vagina’s imprecise
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In Praise of Difficulty & Reading Toni Morrison: A Conversation with Namwali Serpell
“She saw the readers as a chorus, like the chorus in a Greek play, where the audience is part of the ensemble. She gives the example of when you’re in an audience in a musical performance—you’re shouting, clapping, and stomping…
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Hunger
I never remembered the significance of that Beatitude, only that hunger— for God, for food—was part of the equation.
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The Inheritance of Grief and Work: Abbie Kiefer’s “Certain Shelter”
Shelter becomes manifest for the speaker through place, particularly in towns devastated by the loss of industry. Through the setting of small-town Maine, Kiefer examines the way life is transformed after the closing of a town mill, and even more…
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Three Poems
Crumbs — all that’s left of my coffee cake. Plates clatter as they’re loaded in the dishwasher. Ashtrays on the bar. When Hopper painted Nighthawks he didn’t intend to evoke loneliness —a waiter, two men in suits, a woman considering…
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Synanthropia
The mouse moves casually, irrationally, like it is curious. It does not see me yet. It is fat and grey like a mutt is grey. The scream is unlocked, some pre-language gesture at speech. I investigate its texture. Not guttural…
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The Strangest Sky Home Lost and Found in Leo Boix’s “Southernmost: Sonnets”
In his latest collection of poetry, Boix ushers readers into the halls of his personal museum, inviting us to peer within and peruse the memories and artifacts carefully numbered and ordered into the rhymes and lines of sonnets
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Connections and Community: An Interview with Patricia Henley
“It is a writerly habit to notice all the small and large things that comprise characters or potential characters. By the time they reach the page, I may not even recall the source of a snippet of dialogue or a…
