Bale’s aim in this book is to write in a rigorous and entertaining way about medieval travel writing; it would be a disservice to the subject to exclude the fictitious or the tasteless.

The material conditions that underpinned social democracy have disappeared. Against this backdrop, left populism constitutes a sincere, but plaintive, desire for the lost world to return. 

This makes of poetry—true poetry—either a task that is more difficult even than sainthood, or else simply a fool’s errand altogether. There is a dignity specific to either option.

Comics show eyes, minds, people where to go, how to organize spatial information, what’s important, what to see. Photographs don’t, or not in the same way: maps do.

He emphasizes the way that content prophesies form, or the way that form supervenes upon content—which is to say, he emphasizes the way in which the void leaps and sticks its landing.

The desire to flay and spread open the guts, to commit sin and confess it, to claim responsibility by way of observational learning.

There is an established tradition of Latin American novelists who started off as journalists.

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.