Issue 38 | September-October 2015
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…