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…
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 is near the time of my college graduation. I’m graduating early, barely 20 years old. Among my friends, the stuff of my romantic self-sabotage is legendary.
This poem begins with an epigraph: In poetry at least the imagination must not detach itself from reality… -Wallace Stevens I want to be in love forever and not like…
After I finished reading “Wild Geese,” all I could think of was: So what! So what that I am an undocumented person living in hiding, so what that I was…
Of all of the people I know who own a smartphone (a majority, anymore), most of them get up in the morning and immediately reach for said smartphone from their…
As a fiction writer, and as a reader, I gravitate toward stories from the perspective of a specific, imperfect and alert, outward-and-inward-looking consciousness, a transparent eyeball with legs and, at…
A round- cheeked girlchild comes awake in her crib. The green swaddlings tear open I first encountered the last poem I loved, Galway Kinnell’s “Under the Maud Moon,” eleven summers…