Very Like a Hummingbird
Some things can be fixed by fire, some not. Dearheart, already we’re air. — Dean Young, “Elemental” In her poem “Essay on What I Think About Most,” Anne Carson considers…
The Silence of Spring
Silence is incredibly difficult to portray in writing. Samuel Beckett was famously obsessed with the challenge, and went to enormous lengths to conceive of it. But perhaps it can be…
Jerusalem and Albion; or, Maze and Barleycorn
“the imperfect is our paradise” — Wallace Stevens “God uses broken people to reach a broken world.” — Gov. Rick Perry 1. If There Could Be a Center If there…
America, Goddam
I am an American male of northern European descent. Not terribly handsome, not particularly fit. Reasonably intelligent, unless I’m fooling myself. It’s certainly possible. I was raised in a predominantly…
No Shatner: On Arise and Go!
Projects mixing two genres always face a doubled risk: the alienation of not one, but two core audiences, and a consequently barren existence deep in the canyon between one domain…
Aaron Shurin’s Citizen
Citizen marks Aaron Shurin’s return to the prose poem after fifteen years. His previous verse collection, Involuntary Lyrics, was a re-warping of the woof (as Robert Duncan would put it)…
Toward the Indestructible: Sergio Chejfec
Lovers of prose in these image-dominated times have no greater ally than W.G. Sebald. His four books demonstrate that long works of prose—whether they’re called a “long essay,” a…
Vegan Foie Gras (A How-to)
The book is dying. The publishing industry is in decline. Or so we’re told by countless newspaper and magazine articles. Yet a glance at the bestseller lists makes one wonder:…
Give Me the Key
Now in his 80th year, Geoffrey Hill has followed the Yeats template for the septuagenarian poet: though he could easily rest his reputation on his work of thirty or even…