Whatever answers are to be found lie in the blank space around them, that looming, claustrophobic blankness. Snow. Shame. History. Monstrosity. The steaming, stinking heap of it. Carson lets it answer for itself.

In many ways, Hume’s book is about the urge to look away from the brutalities and misogyny woven into daily American life. It’s also about what happens when we stop doing this: when we stop averting our eyes and look plainly.

For the critic-comptroller—the spectator hoping to take absolute measurements and gain new and unambiguous knowledge from the show—the works on view inspired both hyper-focused reading and diverted desire.

It’s with some irony and agony that in 1994 Palmer was asked to contribute to Danish publisher Iselin C. Hermann’s series of autobiographical “notebooks” from innovative American poets.

Cain embraces a promiscuity of references including Chantal Akerman, Elena Ferrante, and Clarice Lispector, elucidating how “things combine to become other things, other kinds of experiences” when brought into conversation with one another.

Early departures, surprise comebacks, protracted witherings, late holdings-on: all different ways of ending things.

This book, then, is a challenge to the status quo, and its lyrical diptychs prove the collaborative enterprise to be a success.

“The essay is a transgression,” begins Suzanne Roberts’s collection of personal essays, Animal Bodies.

The cover of David Shields’ The Very Last Interview features a blurred man in a suit and tie, his skin an inhuman green.

For climate archaeologists, collecting core samples from arctic ice offers a look back in time and a glimpse into an uncertain future.

The Icelandic word for lamb is “lamb,” but the village where I climb down from a tall, hot bus is called “Hvammstangi” and I’ll never learn to pronounce it quite right.