Author Archive
Italo Calvino and the Form of Outer Space
When the distinction between form and content is difficult to perceive, it can become nearly impossible to articulate the relationship between these supposed opposites. This tangle of questions is not limited to the arts; the problem of form and matter is important to anyone who deals with questions of
The Art of Ambiguity
In Helen Oyeyemi’s new novel, time’s tricky manifestations in the material world point toward ambiguity itself as a poetics of unknowing and unseeing.
The Case for Revolutionary Love
Valarie Kaur’s vision for change gathers up opponents into a story, refiguring them as members of one human family.
Levity and Storytelling in A Christmas Carol
With the indefinite article “a,” Dickens seems to declare that the story is not about a carol, but is, instead, itself a Christmas carol: a song for the season.
Lorca in the Mirror
In Mirror Suite, Federico García Lorca explores questions of selfhood using the mirror as his guiding motif, asking how love manages to endure when other people’s interior lives seem so utterly inaccessible, and what it means for an imperfect person to be made in the image of God.
The Poetics of Liberation
The making of necessary new systems of justice and wellness will not be a single act of creation; it will be—and already is—an ongoing act of collaborative composition.
A Carrier Bag Theory of Revolution
In the bigger picture of the “life story,” there appear to be no fixed beginnings or endings—only changes.
Emily Dickinson and the Compound Witness
Reckoning with extreme psychic suffering, Dickinson’s poetic speakers repeatedly confront the boundary between unknowable interior experience and intelligible linguistic testimony.
Leonora Carrington and the Queer Divine
Glittering with playful weirdness alongside mystical spirituality, Leonora Carrington’s “My Mother is a Cow” converges with the Christian tradition of divine incarnation and infuses it with queerness.
The Nearness of the Moon
Italo Calvino’s work reminds us that curiosity itself is a kind of gravity, a pull that is difficult to understand or measure and yet is instinctively, unavoidably felt.