Metaphor’s (Nearly) Infinite Wellspring
Birds are not alone in singing or in originating metaphors. There are other winged creatures that croon and hum and carry. We are among multitudes that raise a chorus to the elements, especially in August. Cicadas, yes, but also crickets, katydids, and grasshoppers.
Writing as Mourning in Kate Zambreno’s Book of Mutter
In Book of Mutter, Zambreno writes, “It is something ineffable about my mother that I search for.” This search, conducted over the thirteen years since Zambreno’s mother’s death, manifests in a fusion of memoir, essay, and meditation, and suggests how writing might embody the lifelong process of mourning a
Imagining the Anthropocene: Danez Smith’s “summer, somewhere”
Danez Smith’s second book of poems, Don’t Call Us Dead, takes up the project of rehumanizing black lives, reshaping lament into forward-looking prophecy. The collection’s opening epic poem, “summer, somewhere,” acts as a book of re-creation, turning premature mortality into a revived, embodied love drawn from the earth itself.
Scattered to the Wind: Three Novels on Migration from the Middle East and North Africa
Three debut novels shed light on migration from the Middle East and North Africa, taking up themes of displacement, longing for home, and the split narratives of a life “before” and “after.”
The Eyes of Writers
The responsibility to organize what we see, to take the randomness of life and reconstruct it into a new form that has meaning, lies squarely with writers and other creative people (scientists and mathematicians alike).
Tacoma and the Stories We Leave Behind
The video game Tacoma is a story about an empty space station where its depths aren’t something presented but searched for—on bookshelves and in bedrooms. Sometimes stories are with the things we leave behind.
Unripe Fruit in Rural Poland
Through it all, Wiola is a clear-eyed tour guide narrator, blasting the reader with the harsh reality of her bildungsroman while simultaneously giving a close-up view of the isolated world she was born into.
Bruno Schulz and a Mother’s Tough Love
Like many things in my life, the writer Bruno Schulz is an example of how I used to focus on men. Men’s troubles, men’s heartache, men’s surprising capacity for emotion. The sight of a man crying would put me in a state.
What’s Left
Handled well, what’s left out can illuminate a narrative, create a kind of translucence through which each scene, each character is given a kind of mysterious importance.
Review: EASTMAN WAS HERE by Alex Gilvarry
In focusing on the interior life of a man in crisis, Gilvarry is able to speak to the beauty that can be found at the end of an existential crisis, at the end of middle age.