Essays

John le Carré’s Life Beyond The Pigeon Tunnel

David Cromwell, a little like Smiley.

On the Fairy Tales School of English-Language Poetry

Poets reframing, repurposing, revising, and revisioning fairy tales are producing some of the most inventive and dynamic poetry today.

Loosening the Flesh & the Mind: Relic & The Taking of Deborah Logan

Watching horror movies is a kind of mastery. Metaphors become literal, and real horror is supernatural.

Why Learning a New Language is Like an Illicit Love Affair

Those are the languages that will consume you—all of you—as you do everything to make them yours.

Somebody Loves Us All: Finding Beauty in a Filling Station

My father’s car wash, Elizabeth Bishop’s “The Filling Station,” and the somebodies who care for us all.

Genre as Network & Hybridity’s State of Matter : An Utterance About Literary Terminology

Genre is definitionally malleable, in flux, molten, unfixed in time and space, and this creates chaos.

Memory Care: A Personal Essay

When my grandfather was losing his memory, my son was learning to talk. The world offered itself to my toddler in corners and syllables.

“They Tell Me Nothing’s Gone”: On Robert Lowell, Life Studies, and Recovery

By the time Robert Lowell started writing most of the poems in Life Studies, he had been hospitalized five times, mostly for acute mania, and all since the completion of…

Virginia Woolf for FCC Chair!

Woolf’s critique of media concentration, slyly embedded in Three Guineas (1938) is highly relevant today.

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