Some poets are wine poets. Walt Whitman is a beer poet. In a Brooklyniana piece from 1862, he describes the Eastern District breweries as “sources of the mighty outpourings of ale and lager beer, refreshing the thirsty lovers of those liquids in hot or cold weather.” In American literature, the boisterous and sprawling poem that . . .
Read MoreThe insults hurled at Carola Rackete, captain of the Sea Watch 3, from the wharf in Lampedusa glanced off her untroubled expression. No dent was made in her self-composure: it was grounded in knowing that, out of a sense of her own responsibility, she had put her body on the line—not something . . .
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“I wouldn’t be in this cult if it weren’t for Bob Dylan. It was forbidden to call The Tribes a cult, but occasionally, hovering over tired feet and yanking at the seat of her pantaloons, my mother would mutter the words under her breath while folding laundry or stirring a large pot . . .
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“If people don’t want to listen to you, what makes you think they want to hear from your sweater?” Fran Lebowitz I want to tell the story of a T-shirt. Not material history—not the story of its cotton, possibly Egyptian, of the history of child labor in the Nile basin, or of recent efforts . . .
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“Despite the superficial tinkering [of the revisions in the Norton English], which, as suggested, is justified by a marketing rationale rather than a literary one, what lingers on is the general incapacity of the Norton English to really step out of mainstream Anglo-American critical paradigms.” —From “The Nortoning of Nagra,” Summer 2019 (Vol. 60, Issue . . .
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A review of The Book of Delights: Essays by Ross Gay (Algonquin Books, 2019) The 2019 Conference of the Association of Writers and Writing Programs concluded this spring, after nearly six hundred panels, readings and celebrations, and over eight hundred vendors and literary presses on display at the book fair—all crammed into three . . .
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“If Amiri Baraka had never published anything but Blues People, he would still be an important cultural critic. The appearance of the book in 1963 is a plausible beginning for when and where cultural studies began in the United States, a starting point that, in fact, antedates the founding of the Centre for Cultural . . .
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Having risen from a branch of the Ni Riverduring a lull in the Battle of Spotsylvania,she settled on the blue upper lip of a deadConfederate corporal, weary. . . .—from “The Mayfly: May 12, 1864,” Volume 60, Issue 1 (Spring 2019) Tell us about one of the first pieces you wrote.The first “serious” . . .
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Begone deadpanmother into stones arranged like a skeleton,begone fatherly blades that scotch my greening. . . —from “Ballad of the Wild,” Volume 60, Issue 1 (Spring 2019) Tell us about one of the first pieces you wrote.Most of my first successful (sort of) poems I wrote in the MFA program at UMass . . .
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