The Space Between: A Personal Essay of Anorexia
The history of anorexia as a phenomenon is unclear, but the term “anorexia” seems to have become popularized in the Western lexicon sometime in the early nineteen eighties, as a…
Conversations: Molly Gaudry and Kristina Marie Darling
Molly Gaudry (L) and Kristina Marie Darling (R) Molly Gaudry was shortlisted for the 2011 PEN/Joyce Osterweil for her first verse novel, We Take Me Apart, which was also finalist…
A Queer Excess: the Supplication of John Wieners
John Wieners, New York City, November 1993. Photo by Allen Ginsberg. The poetry of John Wieners is lyric, bold, shameless. It is a poetry of dereliction in the face of…
50 Shades of Lydia Davis
“Sex is the brightest thread in the thick, strangely cut fabric of our lives; we can never know what it means, but we’re always sure we’re certain.” —Edmund White There are…
Line of Sight: Lineage as Vision
They wrote as women write, not as men, writes Virginia Woolf of Jane Austin and Emily Brontë in 1928. What does it mean to write as a woman? Is it…
Missing the Mark: Nell Zink’s Racial Fluidity
When Jess Row’s “White Flights” was published in Boston Review in 2013, nobody in the American literary world, except perhaps Jonathan Franzen, had heard of Nell Zink, an American writer…
A Lot from a Little: Demystifying the Aphoristic Poem
“Tulip” by Mark Rothko Aphoristic poems are a verbal sleight of hand: minute, almost indecipherable movements generating outsized effects. In his paper, “Aptness and Truth in Verbal Metaphor,” David Hills writes…
For whom the trumpet sounds: on Laura Kasischke’s The Infinitesimals
“They are neither finite quantities nor quantities infinitely small, nor yet nothing. May we not call them the ghosts of departed quantities?” This epigraph from George Berkeley’s The Analyst primes…
A heap of unidentifiable shards: on Vivian Gornick’s The Odd Woman and the City
It used to be that we offered one another the best versions of ourselves. Now we do our best to give the worst. I’m supremely flawed, we all recite in…