Critical Essays Archive
Defiant Witches & Deceitful Echoes: Reading Katherine Anne Porter’s Poetry
Poetry was never Katherine Anne Porter’s central pursuit: as Darlene Harbour Unrue notes in her introduction to Katherine Anne Porter’s Poetry, Porter was “never a first-rate poet, by her own admission.” But the pieces within are hypnotic—Porter’s distinctive and authoritative speakers conjure vast worlds in small spaces.
Carmen Machado and the Corporeal Text
Carmen Machado weaves together textuality, orality, and corporeality in her brilliant short story collection Her Body and Other Parties.
Main Street
Main Street holds an unusual place in my bookish heart: it is one of those novels that I love, but rarely recommend. It is dull. But listen—its dullness is part of its charm.
Raymond Carver, Gordon Lish, and the Editor as Enabler
As the story goes, most of what American readers love about Raymond Carver is not the work of Carver at all.
How Do We Decide What to Read?
There are too many beloved books and not enough prizes, and somehow they get lost underneath all the news about the really important books that I should be reading.
Splintered Selves and Sexual Abuse in Dorothy Nelson’s In Night’s City
Set in 1970s Ireland, Dorothy Nelson’s In Night’s City is an obscure, deceptively slim book. Unofficial predecessor to Eimear McBride’s A Girl is a Half-formed Thing, the novel charts Sara’s attempts to assimilate sexual abuse, suffering, and shame.
A Small-Town Coming Out in an Online World
The Lost Prayers of Ricky Graves starts, like many books set in a small town, with a homecoming.
Sculpting Flesh From Text in My Body is a Book of Rules
How to control the body is a constant theme in Washuta’s work.
Scansion and Contemporary Poetry
How might the practice of scansion as a tool toward understanding and crafting poetry become more equitable and expansive so as to allow for poets’ and readers’ different fundamental orientations toward language?
Thomas Hardy’s Rule-Breaking Heroines
Hardy humanizes his heroines' ambitions, the intensity of their feelings, their fancies and passions. In both Bathsheba Everdene and Tess Durbeyfield, Hardy writes intelligent women who work hard and write their own rulebooks.