Nothing feels like it can be trusted: the quotes, the packaging of the narrative, even the narrator herself. This, of course, makes the novel’s own point—that any telling of a story betrays much more about the speaker than the subject.

The best stories are about people who we don’t really know but think we could. Had we gone to that party we missed; had we been born without that mole.

The text contends that there is such a thing as public space, and that the poet can intervene in it. Moreover, it asserts that Buffalo—a poor, working-class city in the Rust Belt, crumbling from decades of neglect—is capable of ecstatic beauty.

There are no shoulds besides making marks on a page and arranging those words in a particular order; what’s left is a condition of the present, of taste which cannot exactly be spoken to before it changes.

do we live here — wedreamstories&scenesbutwedontlivethem (Notley) — or here — ppleatcronuts&frankoceanieatbusilybetweenyourlegs (Chang)

Writing histories of struggle alongside imagined futures of collective care, there is no isolated subject. Silt’s essays and poems serve as a sprawling manifesto, showcasing the peculiarities of pleasure under capitalism.

Hašek is mocking authority and bourgeois respectability, of course, but the criticism is ultimately of the individual’s inability to tolerate being the butt of a joke. If the universe is absurd, then we shouldn’t be so foolish as to take it seriously.

Their most valuable contribution comes not from extrapolating what “Thoreau would say” about contemporary problems, but in showing where his ideas can lead us when paired with a more robust sense of class consciousness and a stronger drive for action.

In a time of ever-escalating state violence towards intersex, gender non-conforming, and trans people, what do cis scholars writing about gender owe their subjects?

The most beguiling aspect of My Search for Warren Harding is the way Plunket manages to discount the meaning of romance, literature, and history to such an extent that none much help us read his novel.

Rather than a rurality for tourists, a land recast as a bourgeois playground pervaded by natural and cultural heritage, Cain attempts a rurality that is grotesque and potent. He performs a pastoral contaminated by history.

Taylor’s characters fail to reconcile deeper emotional desires with the reality that their immediate environment is not a place to escape, but rather the very territory in which “real life” happens.

In that pulse between orality and literacy, the history of thinking and breathing, something forced—to hurl. Somewhere someone is apologizing for existing.

Indiana’s easygoing syntax—the slippery, casual asyndeton that feels at once half-slangy and half-clinical—isn’t so much naturalistic as anthropological. But self-awareness, like an erection, is hard to keep up indefinitely.

Graham’s poems do not merely describe images of the near future, Anthropocene industry and loss, but enact its immediacy with energetic bursts of syntax contending with their afterwards, their silence: “—& where // does it go now / when it goes away”

Boy Parts displays a preoccupation with photography’s enactment of power and control.

Power doesn’t always come from brute force; in many cases it operates through obfuscation and mystification. Illuminating all of this is the easy part, of course. The challenge is figuring out how to empower the people who work under these conditions.

The book is organized around four city slogans, Queen City of the Lakes, City of Good Neighbors, City of Light, and City of No Illusions—taking the reader through a communal memoir that mirrors that of my family.

Failure, then, is a tonic for hubris, a lesser ward against the performative narcissism of perfection we wear as both shield and mask to navigate these craven times.

There’s also the question of genre itself: there’s an established tradition in American letters of privileging storytelling over truth-telling when it comes to what we might call literary journalism.