Features & Reviews Archives - Page 48 of 775

Teaching the Ineffable: Learning to Pray by Yahia Lababidi

. . . in the end, the poem is its own witness to something indefinable with which the poet is engaged. Whatever the poet thinks it is, the poem itself is the vehicle, the container, describing itself and gesturing beyond its words.

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All the stuff I wish I had known: A conversation with Chloe Caldwell

We’re so quick to define queerness as who you sleep with or who you are attracted to, which I find so boring.

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A Utopia of One’s Own: Heaven Is a Place on Earth by Adrian Shirk

. . . utopia is a living, breathing, imperfect thing that expands and grows with us. It’s always a reflection of our individual selves, of the larger communities we choose, and of the time and place we are born into.

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Everyone is a comprehensive mess: The Rumpus Interview with Robert Lopez

[Your] chosen Bermuda Triangle: the battered psyche of a man, the chosen amnesia of our society, and the resultant nausea of an era.

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So Much At Risk: Talking with Christopher Soto

If I am audacious enough to imagine [my] reader, then I imagine this is a person who has never had the option to look away.

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Perfectly Made and Frighteningly Fragile: This Boy We Made by Taylor Harris

We must learn to see the divine even in our sorrow

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The Present in Its Most Vivid Colors: A Conversation with Ben Shattuck

What does a growth of new grass on a hillside in spring make you feel? Is it a mixture of nostalgia and hope? Or what does a distant mountain range wreathed in a crown of clouds make you feel?

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Clock time has really lost all meaning: An interview with Jos Charles

Some work must be done up very close.

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“Do You Hearest?”: A Review of Ova Completa by Susana Thénon, tr. Rebekah Smith

Where are you, Susana Thénon?—which I think might mean: How does Thénon achieve something more than evasion and isolation with all of this wandering around? Does she land somewhere?—“In a room where if I am I’m not or I am who cares”

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No Way to Avoid Things Mattering: A Dream Life by Claire Messud

The placement of a marquee tent at a party or the tension between the caterer and a housekeeper take on outsized importance.

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Bringing the Exterior into our Private Rooms: A Conversation with Victoria Chang

There’s no reason for cruelty; the joy is in the writing. I always try to remember why I started doing this thing: Because I had to. It’s not a choice for many of us writers to write, but we do have a choice about whether we’re going to be nice or not.

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What to Read When It’s the End of the World

. . . a list of books that I feel are worth reaching for in times like ours—some because they are apocalyptic and heavy in subject or tone, others because they are satirical, and others because of how they show parts of the world that make it worth staying in or show a world so foreign to ours that it helps medicate against some of the tunnel vision of our times

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