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.

I find labels like “spiritual but not religious” fall short for me. It’s a label that misses the tension behind this relationship to faith, doubt, and questioning the institution.

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.

The American chestnut gave me a chance to see something that actually was more or less gone from the natural world, to reach back into the distant past and get a sense of what climate destruction might rob from us again and again.

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.

And there’s manufactured insecurity, which is the kind of insecurity that facilitates the concentration of power and profit, the kind of insecurity imposed on us by our economic and political system. 

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.

The future novel resides with the fans. It will not be written from above or outside. Literature belongs to the davenport.

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.

To even be suspected of treasure—to be indistinguishable from those who possess treasure—is to become a target. This is the lesson of the oyster.

paper cranes on the mantel hampered
by symbolic nature but why not
be more is it justice to want and want

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.

To be a poet in the Anthropocene means trying to incorporate the structures we use in poetry or the kinds of imaginative, weirdo thinking we enact into our other modes of coping and relating.

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.

Books that might be considered staples of the Midwest today were actually bundled into the revolt from the village, seen as mocking the region.

Poetry is, or should be, a kind of thinking; it’s nothingness’s kingdom, where everything is possible. I use poetry to find out what I think.

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.