October 31, 2025 – "That bungalow was where I first read Kathryn Davis’s The Thin Place—a chorus of a novel about a small ...

A crate full of chain falls got delivered. It was a glorious crate, made of sanded spruce. I unscrewed some of the planking ...

Jan Kerouac’s darker and more extreme brand of mischief make her father’s On the Road high jinks seem tame and even a tad ...

Five weeks after Fort Sumter, the official starting point of the war, Ellsworth’s Fire Zouaves received the command to sail ...

September 19, 2017 – About a month ago, at the Museum of Modern Art, I attended a performance of John Cage’s 4'33". I’d read about its famous silence, but because I’d ...

#6 E——— on “How and Why I Have Come to be Totally Devoted to S——— and Have Made Her the Linchpin and Plinth of My Entire Emotional Existence” And yet I did not fall in love with her until she had ...

An encounter with Emerson’s essays. This past October, I found myself in the store looking at a 1990 Vintage Books edition of Ralph Waldo Emerson’s Essays. Not having read much Emerson before, even as ...

Who hasn’t had a boss, supervisor, or mentor worthy of complaint? The first person I worked for, who was white, was in the habit of calling me “weak.” Her boss’s boss, also white, one day gave a ...

I tend not to think that stuff other people think is obvious is obvious. Everyone feels like they have some sense of Frost. Everyone knows a poem or two. That kind of overexposure lends an aspect of ...

Let me tell you about a color that began as a fabled drink. It tasted harsh and punishing, like medicine. It began as a mythic elixir, and then later became a fashionable green: a color for flappers ...

A form of life that keeps itself in relation to a poetic practice, however that might be, is always in the studio, always in its studio. Its—but in what way do that place and practice belong to it?

In October of 1918, a delirious Katherine Anne Porter experienced what she termed “the beatific vision.” Close to death from the novel influenza virus that would kill 50–100 million people, Porter ...