Perhaps the fairest way to judge Tóibín’s success in On James Baldwin is by the same metric he used to judge Baldwin himself, which is style.

Desire renders life like a poem: it collapses space and time, it calls into focus images, sensations, new voices and forms of seeing and saying something.

Hector asked if anyone had run into Gloria. She’d had her last chemo on Friday, he said, which most of us already knew. But no one had seen her since then, all agreeing it was likely she had family in town. And what a marvel it was—I often thought this—knowing the intimate developments of near strangers’ lives. 

Baptize yourself in the promise that every moment might ring with the ecstasy of leftovers fitting just perfectly into a takeout carton.

I’m also an instrument. My wingspan, another measure. I spread my palm beside the grass. What fraction of me is the height of this?

Their analysis lends itself to an intentionally divisive strand of right wing populism that profits from cleaving the white male working-class from a broader multiracial, feminist, and unified working-class—one that might actually have the power to upend capital’s clutches. 

The concept’s opaqueness allowed users to commit neither to the elite circles and institutions that lauded its virtues, nor to the egalitarian sensibilities that insisted creativity was a latent trait evenly distributed across the population.

Perhaps the literary community needs a lot more of the absurd, even in spades, and perhaps especially in relation to economics.

a conceptual shrimp uses its limbs to reshape the reader’s mind, mounding and clefting your mental world until it is the mental world of some other creature: shark, scallop, arthropod boiled down to pure flavor crunch.

What, then, do Jews who are invested both in being in lockstep with the Palestinian struggle and in our Jewish cultural lives do with our Judaism?

Linguists trace the means by which, they say, Black Pittsburghers use language to position themselves relative to, and against, whiteness. The idea that white speech might be made and maintained in order to create racial difference is unexplored.

By the end of the book, we have arrived at the beginning, this introduction to a kind of refractory methodology.

What Mobility offers is a model for centering the personal in a way that amplifies, rather than obfuscates, its political context.

It was my mother who taught me that hummingbirds don’t sleep: they fall into a state called torpor, which is deeper than sleep, more akin to hibernation.

Hard at work in a culture more dedicated to vocational mythologizing than repairing structural supports.

Palacios’ lyrics carefully excavate, document, and interpellate through such questions, interrogating what a peopled coexistence could possibly mean when, amidst modern exigencies.

I feel jealous of Toby Altman for being so obsessed with this topic, which makes his poetry a “serious project.” I worry I am only serious about my love for people.

I’m a little out of the loop.
Before the service, I buy breath mints
instead of flowers.
I wear the wrong shoes.
I leave my facial tissue in the car.

Running through “There’s Always This Year” is a strong biblical motif. God (sometimes capitalized, sometimes not), savior, prayer, mercy, miracles, redemption, salvation, and eternity all permeate the book.

By making Müntzer a scapegoat, Catholics and Lutherans cemented his reputation as an uncompromising iconoclast. This image only made the preacher more appealing to later generations of radicals.