For a certain segment of the American Mennonite population, a segment whose ancestors passed through and lived in Germany, the language of the old country was low German. Low German’s…
If you haven’t read Daniel Bergner’s recent article in The New York Times Magazine, “What Do Women Want?” or better yet, his book, The Other Side of Desire, you should,…
Yesterday I got laid off from my day job at a tech company. This got me thinking about an unpublished essay I wrote a couple years ago about my relationship…
I guess it just took a little time for the poetry blogs to realize that David Orr had been in the NYTBR smack-talking about the lack of greatness in poetry…
Katy Lederer’s poems are both romantic and political in nature. With their attention to formal and lyrical concerns, these poems tackle the problems of desire when it coincides with money…
Survey based on Catholic confessions found that the most common sin for women was pride (followed by envy and anger), while the most common sin for men was lust (followed…
Whoever wrote this poem lo those many years ago ought to be forced to wear those shorts. I’m really surprised there hasn’t been more of a response to David Orr’s…
In 1991, the editors of Richard Scarry’s Best Word Book Ever made some key editorial changes in an effort to level the race, gender and religious biases of the original…
As much as these poems tap into a mythic story of the West, they are not linear narratives, but circuitous maps of anxiety and desire, a portrait of an inner world masquerading as meditations on people and place.
The main character in Karan Mahajan’s novel, Family Planning, is a man who is only attracted to his wife when she is pregnant. “He liked the smooth, alien bulge of…
The enchantment of Dangerous Laughter is not merely a function of the tales themselves, but also of the way in which Millhauser tells them – with careful, attentive prose that…