Ben and his reluctant automobile set out toward a frontier, a place off the map of what we know but still within the boundaries of these United States. He goes seeking what difference that distance makes.In so doing, he tries… Continue Reading
“With Your Shield or On It” is an audacious poem. The poet is reckless, irreverent; he waits on the street corner to be struck down for calling Iggy Pop and Jesus into the same line. The speaker claimsomnipotence,to see everything,… Continue Reading
I went to a reading recently in the West Village, by mostly middle-aged poets. Several of them, men and women, stood and read poems about their dead or dying parents. These parents had lived long, competent lives the poets seemed… Continue Reading
I read Teddy’s essay on the tiny screen of an iPhone, in a Starbucks in New York, half of it while waiting to use the bathroom, half of it while sitting at a small round table next to a beautiful… Continue Reading
“Lan knew he was right and could not argue with him. These days, she had not been able to respond to her son at all. He was magnanimous in the way he dealt with his less educated mother. She couldn’t… Continue Reading
In this piece, Jake addresses “more than one way to read a town.” He points out the dangers of one-dimensional narratives, like the caricature of “Portlandia” or the condescending portrait in the pages of the New York Times. But he… Continue Reading
It’s not so easy to talk about identity. First of all, the concept itself is an abstract one. What does it mean for something to be something else, anyway? And even beyond the discomfort that can result from talking about… Continue Reading
Some writing is born of a dogged faith in the undiminishing power of language. Still more is nursed in the dark, alone, alternately answering and conceding to that most crippling of writerly skepticisms: that words are only ever themselves; that… Continue Reading
When I was a kid, video games meant watching as much as they meant playing. It’s not that I didn’t love to play—and didn’t play plenty—but that, as a youngest brother whose closest friends wereyoungerbrothers,
Occupy Wall Street occurred as I was laid up, recovering from a shoulder surgery in my parents’ house in suburban New Jersey. From there, across the river, the movement appeared a chimera of ideals, naiveté, and anger. Media accounts emphasized… Continue Reading
At first, I wanted to write a response that would be a pastiche of Mariev Finnegan, but I simply haven’t smoked enough “saliva.” One suspects that her fictional world is a little too complete (right down to the consistent linguistic… Continue Reading
“Small Complications” is a simple and direct poem that takes simplicity and directness as one of its subjects, and yet it is also surprisingly nuanced and self-conscious. From the beginning, the poemthrowsout
My favorite part of this story is a little line in the middle, when Francesca is about to truly attach herself to the goofy yet heartbreaking Norm, her closest friend. She is away at college, and he has driven seven… Continue Reading
The idea of vampire deer. The image of a grown man staring at the stars with his hands “pleated” over his eyes. Timothy’s phrase, “they’re lost in the headlights of your gaze.” These are the things that stayed with me… Continue Reading
A poem doesn’t exist solely on the page. It projects from the paper onto the world. Think of it as a recipe. If it is poorly done, you start off wanting to make eggplant parmesan and wind up with pizza… Continue Reading