We were getting along even better than average, actually. I suspected I might be a better person for a while.
But they also promise a conditional escape: if you attain the right knowledge and listen to the right people, you might be able to save yourself and those you love.
Falling out of love, with an object as much as with a person, is a rupture between the past and present selves.
When Pittsburgh refuses to see the world, the city becomes unbearably precious and self-congratulating; and when Pittsburgh refuses to see itself, it takes as truth each insult it has ever received.
Chipmunk on the path almost as fast as I can see it. Underneath the crisping reddish edges—all the fear in the world but I didn’t say it like that.
Both the impotence of art and the complicity of the world in the face of atrocity have demonstrated that armed, decolonial struggle never lost its urgency or necessity, despite what the triumphalists of the “end of history” would have hoped.
If Kairos has an arc, it’s toward her will to act, to feel something other than the guilt and pressure Hans exerts, to question his version of events, to regard his violent control not as inevitable but as a force she can resist.
Watch Your Language shadows So to Speak, offering what the poems can’t—not explanations of the origins of lyric impulse, but a recreation of the process involved in coaxing it.
What Bugs performs for us—and, in a different way, for Elmer Fudd, because the internal machination of their awareness is notably different—is Wagner’s opera.
Armen Davoudian’s first full-length book, The Palace of Forty Pillars, shows for the first time in far too long what meters and rhymes and inherited forms, used deftly and clearly to speak of real lives, can do.
The Downward Spiral, a record explicitly concerned with the decay that issues from indulgence, was recorded in the house that killed the 1960s, in the city that projects image over substance, where glamor circumscribes and hides destitution on a daily basis, in the state that makes consummate the double nature of the frontier as both the height of American exceptionalism and the embodiment of its most brutal expansionist tendencies
The other girls were staring at him rapt as he explained the camp schedule. We had never seen a man like him before. Different from any high school boys we had ever known, football players, brothers, or fathers. I myself didn’t have a father. Just a mother who liked “anything that chugged or neighed.”