Confronting Our Environmental Apocalypse: India’s Ancient Epic, the Mahābhārata
With origins dating back more than two thousand years, the Sanskrit epic, the Mahābhārata began as a collection of myths and stories that over the course of several centuries, came to be unified in a meandering and wildly digressive work.
The Readers: Daphne Merkin and All Our Regular Hells
In her memoir This Close to Happy: A Reckoning with Depression, New York writer Daphne Merkin calls herself “a poor little rich girl” before anyone else can; raised by philanthropist parents on Park Avenue, her financial privileges are plain.
Innocent Mothers and Selfish Daughters
The daughters of Jenny Zhang’s debut story collection Sour Heart and Yiyun Li’s memoir in essays Dear Friend from My Life I Write to You in Your Life are formed from the hardest love: their mothers’.
The Poet’s Palette
There were many ways, surely, for poets to suggest sadness or calm aside from merely the subject matter. Could the idea of a poet’s palette be pushed further—could poets work visually on the page without color to achieve some of the same effects that color would?
The Limits and Freedoms of Literary Regionalism: The Poetics of William Carlos Williams’s “Paterson”
If New Jersey is oftentimes known for being perpetually overshadowed by its neighbor New York, then William Carlos Williams’s epic five volume poem entitled “Paterson” certainly helped put it on the map.
Two New Books Show the Rapid Evolution of the Conversation Around Consent
There’s a long history in English-language literature of men pressuring women into sex. Two upcoming books reveal the evolution in notions of sexual consent, as well as how far we still have to go.
The Grieving Mother of Modern Dance: Isadora by Amelia Gray
The book allows our gaze to lurk in the shadows cast by the family’s grief, and explores what it means to make art even when the world is crashing down around us.
Whitman and Dickinson and the Civil War
Contemporary American poetry was born in the context of the Civil War, the war that claimed more Americans than ever before or since. Whitman and Dickinson, two of America’s seminal poets, were alive and writing poetry during the Civil War.
Trump, Transphobia, and the Lessons of The Argonauts
The tension at the heart of Trump’s recent iteration of bigotry against trans individuals comes through profoundly in Maggie Nelson’s The Argonauts. Nelson writes both movingly and perplexingly about bodies in flux.
“All the Leading and Leaping”: An Interview With Kathy Fagan
Kathy Fagan’s poems explore the mysteries in the matter-of-fact; they bring a sharp eye and tender heart to the exact and strange particulars of life. Her fifth book of poems, Sycamore, was published earlier this year. We caught up over email to talk about this beautiful new book.