I love the broad strokes and sweeping vision of this poem at the same time as I appreciate its specificity, its impressive attention to detail. The forces of good and evil that make up the archetypal beams of this poem create a kind of structural backdrop against which the poem whirs and sparks— from the…

I’m at the beach with my husband, wining and dining on the company dime for a business meeting he has to attend, which can feel like icing on a cardboard cake for all the travel he has to do without me. I don’t vacation well. I’ve never enjoyed packing, sleeping in beds not my own,…

In a recent interview about some stories I’ve written, the interviewer asked several questions regarding film. One in particular was thought-provoking: whether the medium of the motion picture provides more fictive metaphors, more imaginative opportunities for use in stories and novels than other artistic means. That is, does the motion picture qua motion picture, with…

My reading habits, I confess, aren’t literary. I probably lack the training and the gifts necessary to make them so. Instead, they’re theological. I read like a porn addict scours the Internet. Only my pornography is God-talk and my Internet some piece of literature or another. Thus I’m sent into near ecstasy when Stavrogin and…

Maria walks amid the thorn Kyrie eleison. Maria walks amid the thorn, Which seven years no leaf has born. Jesus and Maria.  —From the hymn “Maria walks amid the thorn” Sometimes there is a song underneath the deepest silence. In the birthing room, I went to that place where there is such quiet that the…

Karen An-Hwei Lee lays out her poem “Meditation on Soteriology” so that it looks at first like prose. But you don’t have to read far before you see the wild conjunction of images as poetry. “Paradises of flora and flame,” for instance, takes us aback, since we’d expect to read “flora and fauna.” Similarly with…

Last week, one of my favorite authors, William H. Gass, died at ninety-three. He was an elder statesman of postwar American fiction. His novels include the lauded Omensetter’s Luck, The Tunnel, and Middle C, and he also wrote a number of insightful essays on the craft of writing. His prose is difficult, brooding, and deeply…

Every year after the clocks fall back, I read Lia Purpura’s essay “Sugar Eggs: A Reverie” from her collection On Looking. In the essay, Purpura is concerned with the space created when one looks into another world: the panorama built inside a sugar egg, a snow globe, a “horse’s scummy water trough,” cells massing to…

There are, arguably, many ways in which we need to wake up, hence the need for the variety of stories in this list. Some of these films (Something, Anything; Marty; Punch-Drunk Love) involve meek people waking up from lives dominated by peer pressure and social expectations from their friends or family. Other selections on the…

“My father says almost the whole world’s asleep. Everybody you know, everybody you see, everybody you talk to. He says only a few people are awake. And they live in a state of constant total amazement.” —Patricia, from Joe Versus the Volcano It seems that we now live in an increasingly polarized, disenchanted, fragmented, and…