The Art of Attention: Jill Christman’s If This Were Fiction: A Love Story in Essays
“If you really want to look at someone, then your only option is to look at yourself, squarely and deeply.”
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Join NOW!“If you really want to look at someone, then your only option is to look at yourself, squarely and deeply.”
...morea portrait of the American tendency to keep the suffering of others at arm’s length as if misfortune were contagious, or to ruthlessly eliminate it entirely
...moreThe animal spirit of poetry brings us closer to our own humanity.
...moreAn illustrated review of Sumana Roy’s new essay collection, HOW I BECAME A TREE!
...more“The distances are staggering. It could take you an hour to drive to a spot on the edge of the horizon, yet that spot feels like it’s just within reach,” Barry writes. “This is what it means to live on the steppe. There are no walls between you and nature. You are nature.”
...moreAn illustrated review of Melissa Febos’s new essay collection, GIRLHOOD!
...moreThis book is disarmingly—in fact, unnervingly—amoral.
...moreI’ll never see Kitamura’s exhibition in real life, but I’m still grateful to have been invited to the opening.
...moreThe experience, rather than linear, is borealian.
...moreLim has written before about experimental fiction and the need to slough off such conventions of narrative as plot.
...moreMetaphor can make life more bearable, meaningful, or simply comprehensible.
...moreThe narrator then returns to normal life, only to discover that life may never be normal again.
...moreCombine multiple ingredients in a single stanza-bowl.
...moreRemember us, the characters seem to beg of the reader, imagined mirrors of the real lives lost and mourned.
...moreComposition here becomes a process of discernment rather than pure creation.
...moreIt opens a field of inquiry that stretches to the far corners of culture.
...moreTo be imbricated in hundreds of years of colonial violence is to be entangled in colorist logics and stories of loss and belonging that are rarely linear or singular.
...moreThe Weak Spot is more interested in the invisible forces that guide our ways of being in the world.
...moreHannaham reserves his most vivifying language for planes and crashes.
...moreMorbid humor exists for a reason: to poke fun at our inevitable ends and lighten its emotional load.
...moreYou want to, but do you? Do you dare hope?
...morePleasures and possibilities, though, come hard-won in this book.
...moreAn illustrated review of Laurie Woolever’s new book, BOURDAIN.
...moreActive Reception writes into the place where language fails.
...moreSlipstream may as well be what we call our bewilderment.
...morePoems echo, rebound, and speak to one another.
...moreAmid all this survival, Cho carries the reader through with the comfort of food.
...moreLike a buoy, Agodon’s poems rise above and go below the surface.
...moreThe best books I have read about motherhood have not reassured me that these feelings will resolve.
...moreThe individual and the crowd might prove as false a binary as anything else, even that [perforated] line sketched between poetry and prose.
...more