Novels narrated through IMs or letters can manipulate the space between messages, relying on the reader to intuit the gap between what someone might be feeling and what they might be saying.

Merchant demonstrates that to act as a Luddite is to be anything but out-of-touch: it is to mobilize a common sentiment that marches from the past, and to stride as part of a collective toward a more equitable future.

You thought you knew everything about couplets, and then realize there’s something new to discover in the familiar form. An uncovering of fossils, a tomb whose bones are still intact, jewelry in place and shining around the dusty vertebrae.

In the new post-apocalyptic world, the litany has been lost, the prater silenced. Catastrophe discards everything into the same junk pile of existence; which is to say, catastrophe turns everything into junk.

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.

What may seem at odds—Rilke and exilic Afghan selfhood, the DMAT and exilic Iranian selfhood—is connected and made whole. All become one in a language where poets imagine impossible homes for their fractured selves.

For years, she has stared at the invisible, the unmanifest, and seen it anyway. It is only sufferers who need a name for the silence we live with, who are unable to relinquish hope.

The function of repetition, of questions being asked toward impossibility, is to create the conditions by which prayer becomes a conceivable way of engaging with the world.

If the act of translation is often reduced to a dichotomy of foreignization and domestication, Dodson’s work is an interrogation; apropos of the book’s slippery relationship to the idea of national identity, of what constitutes the foreign and domestic in the first place.

Mullen hands us this unsellable product of the Diary Industry as if it were what we’d always wanted—a project book stripped of recognizable content by the very process of that projection. It’s genre-ending.

After we peel back the narratives that we spin subconsciously, those stories that are shaped by external forces—whether capricious lovers or restrictive laws—maybe we are free to craft new ones.

But if it’s impossible to determine the combination of forces that might elevate a woman to the status of It Girl, that doesn’t mean we have ever stopped trying.

An inchoate despair is the dominant mood of the novel, as Natsumi’s feelings of emptiness, dizziness, and vertigo collide against her Sisyphean rituals of domesticity.

It’s not an exaggeration to say that the story of Elena’s own life is the story of the Russia that was decisively lost in February 2022.

Like a smothering deformative blight, these poems arrive in remission, the moment before full collapse, a slipstream incongruity between locations, futurities, and the clouded cataracts of speculation.

Baseball’s current executives cannot advance the sport as an antidote to the forces that make our lives less lifelike. The logical conclusion of their approach is the slot machine. The desired consumer is not a fan, but an addict.

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.