Elegy for a Broken Body makes clear that it’s not innovation but attention that counts: “even the silence, / if you listened, / meant something.” Continue reading Microreview: Patrick Phillips, Elegy for a Broken Machine (2016)
With Marvelous Things, Mlinko makes a strong argument for the lyric’s author-reader relationship as a singularly rich staging ground for the wonder of human cognition. Continue reading Microreview: Ange Mlinko, Marvelous Things Overheard (2014)
My advice: ignore the bioluminescent / warmth of collective need, the sense nothing’s arbitrary.
Continue reading Poem: Okay, Cupid
Given its low profile, one might think that American poetry has the potential to teach us a thing or two about how to live in a surveillance state. Continue reading Microreview: Privacy Policy: Lyric Privacy in the Surveillance State (2015)
How much was the product of the poets’ heliotropic tendencies and how much the offspring of the kudzu-like culture of “lyric reading”? Continue reading Essay: Form Dysfunction: On Caroline Levine, Terrance Hayes, and Frederick Seidel (2019)
The history of literature is a history of literary gossip. Continue reading Essay: Death From Above: On Joseph Kaplan’s ‘Kill List’ (2013)
There’s nothing dandier than threadbare threads / worn by a discerning shabby dresser.
Continue reading Poem: The Gentle Art of Shabby Dressing
If Frankenstein can be read as a searing critique of Romantic hubris—the folly of “playing God” through science we do not fully understand—then CSI might best be understood as an effort to flip Shelley’s script, rehabilitating science as a form of social control. Continue reading Essay: Hannibal’s a Cannibal: Allegory, Ideology, and Serial Killer Aesthetics (2014)
