Critical Essays Archive
W. S. Merwin’s Ancestral Memory in Victoria Chang’s The Trees Witness Everything
Almost every poem in Victoria Chang’s new collection gets its title from a W. S. Merwin poem of the same name. Both poets seem to believe in the idea that history and life are really just ongoing cycles designed to propel us forward, just as they also keep us
Climate Resignation in Inter Ice Age 4
A forgotten classic in the realm of climate fiction, Kōbō Abe’s 1958 sci-fi thriller represents a telling effort in assessing why so many of us feel resigned to our climate fate—and why it is fundamentally difficult to understand the magnitude of the problem that lies before us.
The Real and the Unreal in Lesser Known Monsters of the 21st Century
The interplay of fantasy and reality in Kim Fu’s stories represents a yearning, through fantasies, technologies, and dreams, for the divine.
Urban Tumbleweed’s Interrogation of the “Natural” World
In calling attention to her own unknowability, Harryette Mullen deconstructs preconceived notions about the delimited spaces of urban/rural, Black/white dichotomies, while enlarging the boundaries for Black writing, Black experience, and Black authority.
Zadie Smith’s Exploration of Experience as Authority
What Zadie Smith does in showing a Kilburn girl located within the Wife of Bath’s voice of experience is to open up space for thinking through the particular authority—the particular value and, especially in the play’s conclusion, the particular forms of sexual justice—such experience offers.
Maggie Nelson’s Complication of Freedom
In her 2021 book, Maggie Nelson comes to identify and appreciate freedom’s paradox—that true freedom comes with an understanding of limits, or an appreciation of the idea of constraint.
Oliver Sacks and the Narratives of Disability
Oliver Sacks recognized that stories have a closer connection to the full complexity of the human condition than science. Nine years after the birth of my daughter, however, I realized that most existing narratives tell us more about cultural misconceptions of Down syndrome than providing a full, complex picture
Conversation in The Affirmations
The poems in Luke Hathaway’s new collection demand attention, both with their often austere beauty and their rich and challenging depth of reference, but these poems contain so much conversation that it would feel strange to read the book in absolute isolation.
Doing Nothing and Eat, Pray, Love
Elizabeth Gilbert’s 2006 memoir explores a restlessness she spends her sojourn contending with. It is a restlessness brought on by a rift that has formed between her mind and her body, a restlessness shared by all of us who were raised on the lap of the Protestant work ethic.
Imagination and Repetition in Chronic Illness Memoir
The aesthetic project of chronic illness memoir is inescapably tied to its political project. Within the wider genre, we might discern a politics of repetition.