Favorite Bookish Thing 2016: Gene Wolfe’s Castle of Days
In choosing Gene Wolfe’s Castle of Days, I think: Anybody else touches it, I’ll eat them. (I’d go hungry if it …
A Thanks, Lucia Perillo
It’d’ve been a shame for me to say anything but thank you, and even that I tried to pass by …
Such, in pursuit of a god
Bill Pulley was in college in 1964. He went to Vietnam and came back to a career in the government’s …
A Letter: ‘Why Ought a Writer—’
The alert popped up, reminding me. I knew it’d come up faster than I expected. Essays do that, always. So …
Writerly Silence & the Reader
Silence is the void in which the listener expects. A void is complete—the space around the listener’s expectation is full with …
E-mail to S—
S— Got too close to the publishing side again. That edge draws out the immediate and at that immediate, the end. …
For St. Valentine: GREATER THAN LOVE. Cook, Spector, et al.
Maya Angelou chatted with Dave Chappelle and said that the chief virtue to unlocking all other virtues, including love, is …
Some Game-Poem Aesthetics
Recumbent, bent over my lower back, coffee of the weakest sort made with the last beans. Sunday. And now, editing, …
Aeschylus’ Io
Io. A moon of Jupiter now. Before that—a young princess, a nymph, daughter to Inachus, the King of Argos. Ocean’s Daughters, …
For St. Valentine: Seven Days of Love Poems. Rimbaud.
Mystic On the slope of the hill, the angels turn their wool robes in pastures of steel and emerald. Flame …
Yezzi’s Bitter Fool
When did our pleasures become so wan and modest, and so breezily proffered? David Yezzi’s article appeared in the New …
Seamus Minen
Mine is sapling-young. Mine is sourced from the gravity of others—indirect as the sun from car window to concrete. I …
Organon Next: ‘The Quickest Sand’
This question stemmed from a tweet by Boston’s Spece: “Politics, confessionalism, identity poetics—refuse. Literary merit. That is all. #iupampo #w00t” Celebratory …
Sunning in a Nunnery; or, ‘A Review in 11 Fits’; or, Aandaal’s “The Song of Kamadeva, God of Love” (Trans. Ravi Shankar)
Ravi Shankar vs. Aandaal, eighth-century female saint. A translation from Tamil to English presented in Cortland Review’s ‘Summer Feature: In …
