Essay |
“With This Needle I Thee Mend: The Oldest Tool Still Used”
“Hanging by a thread, we have kept our secret weapons, our needles, and brought them along for millennia.”
Essay |
“Friendship on the Page”
“… the continuous intertwined narrative of a reciprocal exchange between just two correspondents … I found exactly that in the correspondence between William Maxwell and Eudora Welty.”
Fiction |
“Lluvia Sin Agua”
“There was a rumor that today at five the camion-cisterna would return to their barrio. The big truck that sells water to the areas outside of the city that don’t have a water system. Ever since the water shortage started, the trucks came to el barrio less and less, until eventually it was just once a week.”
Essay |
“Diversity: A Garden Allegory”
“The covenant for our homeowners association specifies that what I’ve done around my house is technically prohibited. There should be fewer wildflowers in my yard. Banish the milkweed.”
Essay |
“Metaphor As Illness”
“Illness is obscene in its reality. No wonder we hurry to clothe it in metaphor, to drape it in wooly lengths of symbolism.”
Commentary |
“Poets Recommend” / Part One
In the first of four April installments of “Poets Recommend,” we comment on new collections by Aaron Smith, Tommye Blount, and Fiona Benson
Text and Image |
“The Unfinishing: My Photographs of Alex”
“I remember feeling compelled to keep shooting, and I did so every day. It was as if I had just been skimming the surface of things until I lived on his land.”
Commentary |
Resisting Translation: on Pale Colors In A Tall Field, poems by Carl Phillips
“Poems so intricately paid out — in suspensions, eddies, asides, interruptions, questions, suddenly opened fields, and tidal pools of perception — that time disappears into mind, mind into body. Sentence into sentience.”
Essay |
Life’s Work: on the Poetry of Jane Mead
“Jane Mead brought her five books of poetry and 14 new poems into To the Wren: Collected & New Poems, 1991-2019. She died less than a month after its publication.”
Interview |
A Conversation with Lydia Davis
“For a long time, Grace Paley’s approach was my model: politics, family, and friendships first — and writing second. I may have that wrong, or may be idealizing, but that seems to me at the moment a good balance.”
Commentary |
on Survival is a Style, poems by Christian Wiman
“Wiman refuses despair — though, like Job, he has many reasons to embrace it. Nor is the hope he chooses naïve; like joy, it’s a hope that affirms the reality of suffering.”
Fiction |
“At The Last”
“‘I don’t want to be married anymore.’ Is that how he said it? Or was it the harder, the more particular, ‘I don’t want to be married to you anymore’? He doesn’t remember.”
Poetry |
Five Poems by Sergei Yesenin
“Yesenin called himself ‘the last poet of the village,’ both in the sense of his peasant origins and of being the last poet of his contemporaries concerned with country life …”
Commentary |
on Inside the Critics’ Circle by Phillipa K. Chong
“Many interviewees said they weren’t sure they ‘counted’ as a critic because they don’t self-identify as one. They often write less out of a sense of journalistic public service and more to reinforce their professional standing elsewhere.”