As a reader, it’s flattering to be let in: to understand that the writer is playing with expectations, starving you a bit of plot, feeding you a ton of side dishes instead of a meat and potatoes dinner.

Last time I saw her, it was also during hurricane season, I said—there to inspect the land before it got washed away, I thought. She wanted to see what our constructed world was like before it was leveled again.

Like those whosay  light  accumulates — step closer understanding that weshudder at what youbuild.

When the body is only a body in fantasy, speech acts are the only acts possible. Words are slippery and the narrator is twisted up in them like sardines.

I imitated a cormorant’s wings with my elbows, flocking with the birds, then I turned to walk home alone.

It often seems like this is not a book in praise of excess so much as one deathly afraid of it. Everything truly excessive is neutralized, sublimated into rarefied high culture and righteous philosophy. Sometimes shit is worth just staying with.

I didn’t settle upon philosophy out of some dispassionate search for meaning; I turned to it because I felt like I was drowning and was desperately searching for a life preserver.

There is a Beguine spirit in renunciation. But without a God for whom they can gouge their eyes out, Nicholson’s speakers become not separate from the world, but marked by it. They let it in with a private sense that they may not really be of it.

In revisionist feminist art and literary histories, a premium is placed on the young, suicidal woman

Falling out of love, with an object as much as with a person, is a rupture between the past and present selves.

The buds are insistent that the roots' energy is expressed despite the trunk’s non-existence, and there is little evidence I have tried to live a single moment with such vigor.

The mother-writer is becoming its own category, one recognizable for its ambivalence and disclosure not only of the difficulties of creating something, but watching your creation live outside your control.

These are in many ways Marxist novels, or at least grounded in Marxist critiques of what the wage and bourgeois society do to the human soul. Labor and land are decisive forces on these characters. They squat in inherited apartments or drift on boats.

Right when the building is reduced to rubble, I’m tying my shoes. I miss the best part. What a waste of waste.

Maksymchuk’s words accrue a mountain of humanity in the ends of inhumanity. Ascend it; peer over language’s walls. Can her poetics actually cross them all?

Frazier wants to slow these moments of change down, hold them fast, and provide them with the level of reflection given to art in prestigious spaces like MoMA’s galleries. The exhibit opens with her instruction that we understand her works as “monuments for workers’ thoughts.”

Can an object—in the form of language—seeping out of these cracks elucidate some semblance of a truth?

Kinsky maintains that film is a contact sport: not simply fingertips feeding celluloid through a projector (though this is detailed often and affectionately), but also eyes carrying images like palmfuls of water

This never really happens, but I wanted it to be a book that anybody could read, more or less, because I got so many ideas for stories from people I worked with—when I worked on farms or in light construction, or growing up working at a pizza place. I always write and read in the morning, and when I worked on the farms or in construction, I would try to do a little bit before work since I knew the day was going to be tiring.

J & C & I peel our greens

into trash bags a little fast

our tempos try to forget

debt’s discipline trash bags

of greens pile against the fence