Blogs
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The Last Book I Loved: Small Porcelain Head
The first time I read Allison Benis White’s Small Porcelain Head, I was screening manuscripts for a book prize on my honeymoon. Admittedly, it’s an odd way to celebrate nuptials, but I thought I might read some of the manuscripts…
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Things I Say to Pirates on Nights When I Miss You by Keely Hyslop
Pirates plunder. Pirates navigate by wit and savvy and force. They intercept us somewhere between where we were and where we think we are going to end up. They are the enemies of intention. Where we might ask, Where is…
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The Last Book I Loved: Dream Songs
My relationship with John Berryman’s Dream Songs, like the songs themselves, is murky, complicated, obscure in origin, and not easy to explain—not even to myself.
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David Biespiel’s Poetry Wire: The Genius of Adrienne Rich
I’m surprised by the amiable but lukewarm reception Ange Mlinko gives in The Nation to Adrienne Rich’s Later Poems: Selected and New. The 500+ retrospective was published late last year. Mlinko holds at arm’s length the charms of Rich’s later…
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Dark Elderberry Branch: Poems of Marina Tsvetaeva
Dark Elderberry Branch is a collaboration between two living poets and one who is dead but fully present. Ilya Kaminsky was born in Odessa (former Soviet Union, in the Ukraine), learning English at the age of 16 when his family…
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Swinging Modern Sounds #41: Utopian Communities
Bands, those funny little plans, that never go quite right, is a line from a really great song by Mercury Rev (“Holes,” from Deserter’s Songs), a song that rightly probes the mixed feelings that you might have about bands had…
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Spit and Mud
What I remember most about church is all the sitting, standing, and kneeling, the stink of incense, the calm of the priest’s voice, the hard wooden pews, and not really understanding why every Sunday, I found myself, alongside my family,…
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FUNNY WOMEN #93: Revised Pinterest FAQs
Pinterest is a million-page woman’s magazine written by everyone you’ve ever met and edited by no one.
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THE NEXT LETTER IN THE MAIL: Elissa Bassist
The next Letter in the Mail, going out this Friday, is from Elissa Bassist. Elissa Bassist is the editor of our Funny Women column. Her writing has appeared here on The Rumpus, in The New York Times, NYMag.com, The Paris Review Daily,…
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The Better Bombshell
This week marks the launch of the anthology The Better Bombshell, a collaboration of writers and artists exploring female role models.
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Nick Cave Monday #22: “Jubilee Street”
Goth girls everywhere will soon breathe a collective sigh of relief causing a variance in the Earth’s orbit. We have been waiting since 2008 for a new Bad Seeds record and we are so very close. “Push The Sky Away”,…
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Conversations With Writers Braver Than Me: Melissa Febos
In Whip Smart, Melissa Febos unflinchingly chronicles five years in her early twenties when she was a dominatrix and heroin user. But the book is about so much more than those details.