What illness and pain cast into relief is that our minds will always be lost in translation—and will always remain in a liminal space—somewhere between our embodiment and the outer world.

Kojeve’s theory of desire, based on Hegel’s lord-bondsman dialectic and a huge influence on the thinking of one Jacques Lacan, was that desire isn’t simply about desiring an object, but rather about desiring to be desired, and desiring the object that desires you, in what could potentially become a house of mirrors of recognition and mis-recognition

“Bless us, o Lord,” went the reverential drawl, “and watch over our riders and our livestock. And Lord, protect the brave men and women serving in our armed forces and our first responders. And Lord, we pray that you will guide our elected officials as they seek to lead this country through difficult times.”

I didn’t feel like a god.

Thank God I don’t feel like a god.

It’s easy to imagine, though, that many of these stories exist in the same universe—dilapidated and hyper-developed, inhabited by emotionally fragile and lonely characters desperate for some type of human connection. Like many stories that are sci-fi by nature, it presents fictitious realities that are just believable enough to be scary.

So the broccoli on my plate are elms, the mashed potatoes a castle, and the brown sauce is the moat’s muddy water. The sauce’s beans are crocodiles to scare off your enemies. In the castle there’s a radish that rules the kingdom, and a tower where a small marinated carrot I adore is being held captive.

What happens during waking hours, on the other hand, is not a lie. But subjective experience is as unprovable as a dream – particularly for those whose reality is centered around their own body, and how it differs from the norm.

Progress. It’s supposed to be good

for you, for you, and only you.

At the edge, a self reflects through and refracts against another; this is how the book situates itself historically, not about identity but moving through the possibility of several identities.

Maybe all I want from a movie—what any of us wants—is not only something to talk about, but something to talk to.

For cloistered out here, away from all human influence, free of all the clutter and the bustle and the bars, their words took on a life of their own. They took our language and turned it into something new, gave it an alien life.

Leda constantly invents and reinvents the mythology of himself, as if writing his own hagiography.

Ruby’s style of argument—choppy, playful, sometimes sonically enticing—invites us to look, not just at “poetry” as a concept, but at the poem we happen to read, whose sounds we likely imagine in our heads as we move to the end of each line, along with the person who might have composed it.

I liked the emergency room doctor who said, “This isn’t an emergency. You could’ve waited another hour.” Then stabbed a thing into my lung.

Each appearance of gender, which is to say each appearance in our lives of those fuzzy unconscious signals, breaks up and splits into multiple messages.

The poems in Grand Tour are marked by restlessness: their speakers seem uncomfortable, even trapped, within their lyric moments.

Somehow the lists got switched

so now when darkness trips

the streetlamps in a single flick

I stand on the porch and yell 

for Operation Total Fury

Chekhov’s gun isn’t always firing; sometimes it’s just the small, insignificant moments that happen in the meantime, described with clarity and grace, pinpricks of tenderness, the levity of a vignette that passes, that means nothing, that means everything, that exists.

The student loan bubble? Tensions with China? The hollowing of rural America? The collapse of the reasonable center? Medical debt, race relations? My God, the climate crisis, and on top of all that the looming threat of another four years, which, all liberal hysteria aside, our enemies in the Kremlin were probably planning right this moment? It added up, and it added up, and it added up until one actually could not believe how much it was adding up.

The result is a remarkable work of synthesis, overlay, and double exposure, in which past and present, child and adult, literary figure and family member illuminate each other.