Flyover Country
Michael Martone teaches the flown-over writer to treat the Midwestern setting with dignity and curiosity, allowing the landscape to help characters tell their stories.
Fear and Selfishness in The Dangers of Smoking in Bed
In Mariana Enriquez’s most recently translated story collection, people are afraid: afraid of poverty, afraid of solitude, afraid of confronting the grotesqueness of their own mistakes. One of the strings binding the collection is that again and again fear pushes the characters into committing craven acts of selfishness.
The Chorus of There’s a Revolution Outside, My Love: Letters from a Crisis
The new anthology, edited by Tracy K. Smith and John Freeman, documents last summer’s period of quarantine and protest, bewilderment and commitment. Over the pages, the resonances build like voices gathered in a street singing justice songs.
Homeland Elegies and America’s Liberal Project
Ayad Akhtar poses a challenge to liberal consensus not by denying the existence of America’s foundational inequalities along lines of race, class, and gender, but by questioning whether the liberal project of advancement through representation is capable of catalyzing the structural changes necessary to address them.
From “I” to “We” in Winter and Refugia
Collections by Sarah Vap and Kyce Bello, united in their simultaneous gaze on mothering and our ongoing human-created climate emergency, show us that dissolution of the individual self is inevitable and necessary— not only in motherhood, but also as we face the climate crisis.
“Sometimes the poems know things that we don’t know ourselves”: An Interview with Jay Deshpande
Recognizing the ephemerality of their wisdoms, Deshpande allows his poems to exist as monuments to themselves, that we might return to them in the future and experience their lessons anew.
The Ghosts of the Unseen in The Ones Who Don’t Say They Love You
Maurice Carlos Ruffin writes about fathers trying to reach their sons, about peoples recently released from prison, about fathers with dead daughters, about people experiencing homelessness, showing the erasure that they feel by writing about these unseen, and about the ghosts that try to reach them.
Revisiting James Wright’s Shall We Gather at the River at Fifty-One
It is an understatement to say that Wright’s fourth collection had its work cut out for it, and it is no surprise the reception of the book was dramatically and passionately mixed.
Love, Community, and Honesty in Jane Wong’s Meet Me Tonight in Atlantic City
Jane Wong’s memoir reminded me that Asian American literature could be more than stories of poverty or prestige porn. Reading it is not always comfortable—some anecdotes are sad, squeamish, and cringe-inducing, but it is an honest look at a working-class community that is too often forgotten.
Considering the Wedding Poem
One does not take notes from the epithalamium for instructions on how to arrange a wedding, how to make a marriage successful, how to communicate with a loved one. The wedding poem anticipates its continued listening, sometime in the future.