Death Poetry During a Pandemic

I teach poetry—not writing poetry but reading it. Students in my class start with a study of sound and...

On Not Swimming

First Lap The pools were all closed in the summer of 2020, because of the pandemic. I missed them...

“Why would you enter a dying field?” “You need a master’s degree to shelve books?” “Must be nice to...

In 2020, with another financial crisis looming on the horizon, the US culture industry has appropriately mythologized the 2008...

If a photograph is like a time capsule, a tribute that one pays in the present to the future,...

…restrained from entering into more important concerns by political and civil oppression, sentiments become events, and reflection deepens what...

The poet, novelist, and gardener Vita Sackville-West was not yet forty when she wrote her novel, All Passion Spent, published...

By beginning a diary, I was already conceding that life would be more bearable if I looked at it...

A deep swab of the nostril is rarely an auspicious beginning to a fun night out. But in the era of COVID-19, this particular...