Reading Archive
The Anti-Ekphrastic: Art Inspired By Text
Writers often respond to visual art, a form known as Ekphrastic prose or poetry, and most famously as John Keats’ “Ode to a Grecian Urn.” But what happens when the form is inverted? The anti-ekphrastic takes many forms: The Futurists were the first to create sound poetry, or the
Mirrored Crisis: Contemporary Immigration and Atticus Lish’s PREPARATION FOR THE NEXT LIFE
Most of us who now call ourselves Americans were at one point something else, or else we owe our citizenship to family members who immigrated. In the brouhaha of fear following the Paris attacks however, this has almost entirely been forgotten, adding more steps to an already long process for any refugee
Other Countries
Sometimes I have to remind myself that the Black Writer In America is a cosmopolitan entity. The news can do that to you, even in February. Obviously there’s Harlem, and before that, there was the mass exodus from the South to the North, to experience life among people who
The Best Short Story I Read in a Lit Mag This Week: “Nashua” by Sara Majka
A critique often heard in creative writing workshops is that the protagonist of a story is too observational—read: passive—and not enough involved in the action, rendering a story that is either too “quiet” or a protagonist with too little at stake in the outcome of the plot. I think
Presto!: A comparison of Magical Reveals in Fiction
A friend and I were recently talking about weird fiction. We were trying to figure out when the best time to make the “magical reveal” would be in a story. Should it be in the very first few lines so a reader knows what they’re getting into? Should it
Review: THE DARKENING TRAPEZE by Larry Levis
The Darkening Trapeze Larry Levis Graywolf Press, January 2016 96 pp; $16 Buy paperback The Darkening Trapeze, Larry Levis’ second posthumous book of poems since his death in 1996, is a strikingly self-conscious collection, a book whose lyrical depth and sweeping beauty is checked by gossip, unflattering confessions, jokes,
On Dressing Up
There’s a section of Alexander Pope’s The Rape of the Lock that’s famous enough to have its own almost-official title. The Toilet Scene. People mention this scene often when they talk about the poem’s mock-epic qualities, its training of a heroic gaze, modeled on the loftiness of The Aeneid
The 2016 Campaign Trumps Any Novelist’s Imagination
Compared to the rest of the world, presidential campaigns in the United States are long. They weren’t always such—once upon a time they were Hemingway-long, but now they are Tolstoy long. When you live in a state with a primary or caucus, outlasting the endless stream of political
On Crafting Presidential Narratives
Martin O’Malley’s failed presidential bid is a novel that writes itself, and I’d write it tomorrow if my plot wouldn’t risk turning into fan fiction. A handsome, two-term governor gets bested by a woman and a socialist and suspends his campaign after receiving 0.5% of the vote in the
How We Belong Somewhere
How does a poet come to belong to a place? Who are the poets of our American places? As I travel in and around Boston I’m reminded of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow. His verses leap to mind when visiting Plymouth, the Wayside Inn in Sudbury, or the Old North Church