Our parents showed up to retrieve us. They wanted to know why we would do such a thing. My friend and I looked at each other and just shrugged our shoulders.
It was strange. Volume One of Karl Ove Knausgaard’s six-volume memoir/novel was, with one traumatic exception near the end, the story of a typical young man. He had a typical…
Therein lies the brilliance of “Satan Says”: Olds's Satan is not villainous because he urges the speaker to denounce her parents ... but because he is too obtuse to comprehend the uselessness of such denunciations to a curious intellect.
July fifth. My girlfriend and I are waiting on Chinese food to be delivered while the neighborhood kids work their way through buckets of excess firecrackers and I come across…
I’m quite sure that if I lived when Gertrude Stein did, I would have not enjoyed her person—the pronouncements, the relentless self-promotion, the blatant self-absorption (“I am a genius”). If…
Sometimes, it’s easy to think of the poem as a conversation one might have in a bar. And sometimes, to follow the metaphor through, the poem is a surprising conversation,…
It’s fitting that Nicole Blackman leads into the poems of Blood Sugar with a quote from the confessional poet W.D. Snodgrass: “I am going to show you something very ugly.…