The Last Book I Loved: Re-reading Dana Levin’s Banana Palace in 2019
In such a context, Dana Levin’s particular apocalypses deserve another look.
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Last Book I Loved
The Last Poem I Loved : “The Planned Child” by Sharon Olds
The poem is no longer a part of the book I own. I ripped it out, had it framed, and nailed it to the wall right next to the door in our master bedroom.
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The Last Poem I Loved: The Waste Land
It is March, almost April, and the year feels like a spool of days spliced out of order, leaping treacherously from sun to ice to sun to rain to snow.
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The Last Book I Loved: Poeta en San Francisco by Barbara Jane Reyes
Through incisive and uncompromising verse, Reyes unearths the hypocrisy at work in exalted American democracy…
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The Last Book I Loved: So Long, See You Tomorrow
By drawing us into his childhood, Maxwell shows us how to revisit our own. We become the storytellers of our own lives.
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The Last Book I Loved: The Telling
After what seems like a lifetime of bracing and bottling, I’ve gotten closer to settling my fourth-grade trauma.
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The Last Book I Loved: Abbott Awaits
Summer works like this. Every day small moments cycle like waves within tides, eroding our opportunities on a geological scale invisible from our point of immersion.
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The Last Book I Loved: The Loss of All Lost Things
I recognize something in the stories… It’s the culture of “I made it” versus the culture of staying behind, the culture of achievement versus the culture of guilt.
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The Last Book I Loved: Sheila Levine Is Dead and Living In New York
But when my loneliness feels as vast—and capable of drowning me—as the sea, this book about self-destruction comforts me more than any self-help.
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The Last Book I Loved: Station Eleven
In the distance between me and the story, I can see all the ways I would have to change without technology, because of all the ways technology has already changed me.
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The Last Book I Loved: After Birth
I wanted what Ari wanted: affirmation that I could be a good mother while making mistakes and having ugly, difficult thoughts.
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The Last Book I Loved: Solo Faces
Reading Solo Faces, I felt like I was peering into a life Matt and I once longed for, one I never entered completely.
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The Last Book I Loved: The Way We Weren’t by Jill Talbot
None of us has telepathy, and even the most empathetic of us can’t really experience the world as another person experiences it. So we read essays and memoirs.
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The Last Book I Loved: Lovers at the Chameleon Club, Paris 1932
What makes a person who they are? Is evil born or made?
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The Last Book I Loved: Beautiful Ruins
I’d been treated for cancer, left my husband, patched things up, and just as life was veering back towards Normalville, it took a headlong swerve.
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The Last Book I Loved: Home
I’ve been drawn to Morrison lately because I’ve been thinking about historical and social wakes as I’ve felt the swaying of the ones I’m in.
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The Last Poems I Loved: John Berryman’s Dream Songs #265 and #279
I have a tendency to read difficult books when my life is difficult.
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The Last Book I Loved: Heather Has Two Mommies
“Did everyone but her have a daddy?” Why—at age three—would you weep for a parent you didn’t have and had never known? I didn’t buy it.
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The Last Book I Loved: The Delicacy and Strength of Lace
In letter-writing, we are not really talking, but the words represent the deep-heldness of our communication.
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The Last Book I Loved: Dear Lil Wayne
During the eight months he was sentenced to Rikers Island, a poet named Lauren Ireland wrote postcards to Lil Wayne. The rapper never responded, but the writer compiled them into a tiny purple book.
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The Last Poem I Loved: “Locking Yourself Out Then Trying To Get Back In” by Raymond Carver
Some deep part of me thinks that this is all poetry is, at best: a clear record of a moment where something catches.
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The Last Book I Loved: The Ocean at the End of the Lane
I couldn’t wait to read it, but I was also infinitely patient. It’s that delayed gratification thing. I’m a sucker for it, and there are books that are worth the wait.
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The Last Book I Loved: Pen & Ink
I was so very tired of being judged and dismissed. The more others pressed their expectations upon me, the more I turned to tattooing to protest.
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The Last Book I Loved: Seven Nights
About a month ago, I found Seven Nights in a moving box. I sat down on the basement floor, started reading, and got flung back to that amazing train ride from Chicago to Houston.
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The Last Book I Loved: Where’d You Go, Bernadette
Bernadette Fox is awesome, but she is also kind of losing it, and I get it.
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The Last Poem I Loved: “‘Hope’ is the thing with feathers” by Emily Dickinson
Dickinson realizes that hope shifts and flutters and changes within you.
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The Last Poem I Loved: “Let me tell you” by Miller Williams
They don’t usually realize that every line, every word of a poem, is there because the poet consciously chose that word instead of some other one.
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The Last Book I Loved: I Sang to Survive
“And I think you’d like this,” he said, bringing out a book for me. “My mother wrote it.” I thought: Oh, shit.
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The Last Book I Loved: Krabat
1982 was a shitty year. I was 9 years old and in the 4th grade in Appleton, Wisconsin. My parents were going through a nasty divorce, the kind of thing you see on Jerry Springer.
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The Last Poem I Loved: “For You” by Jim Moore
Suddenly I understood more deeply what the end of the poem means, when the speaker knows his decisions will change his life, but still has no idea what else may come as a result.
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