To go back to the comfort that is childhood reading, before it was ruined by us high school teachers—back when we could both get lost in a marvelous book and finish it in an afternoon.

Since at least the French colonial occupation of the 17th century, the Great Lakes Megaregion (GLM), that grand region spanning the middle of North America including parts of both the US and Canada, has maintained an unprecedented network of production and exchange of global importance.

Tobias Wray, I forget the way you pulled us in, asked us to make you bigger than you were.

About 60 years ago I arrived home on the afternoon school bus to find several small sedans parked in our driveway.

We’re in someone’s kitchen; a kid is sitting on the floor.

Explicit vulnerability in the face of great evil renders the vulnerable both a target and a champion of resilience against oppression.

I first begin to write about Kate Zambreno’s Drifts in the midst of a New England blizzard, and it’s hard to imagine better weather for reflecting on the ars undulatis of a book so intensely interested in the fleeting, snowflake material of life: days upon days that pile up and melt away.

Another contender for a literary novel that may offer an adequate appraisal of and response to our climate crisis is Karl Ove Knausgaard’s The Morning Star.

Black artists have it bad in Cleveland.

Neuroscientists tell us that what comes to the retina of the eye is only a part—and not even the largest part—of what we see.

I’m writing this in a plane flying south over California, from San Francisco, where I grew up, to Santa Barbara, where I attend grad school.

Several years ago, I taught John Berger’s Ways of Seeing, and I read and reread it, and not long after, I also wrote “That Summer That Year During the Heat Wave.”

Wanting to write about looking at screaming, the woman clicked again on a video by Kim Beom in which a slate-clad actor playing an artist stands at an easel to teach her (and whomever else is watching) how to make a painting titled Yellow Scream—will it help?

Chest forward, he strides on stage with an Elvis-inflected, hip-swaying, rolling cowboy-amble, wearing a severe expression beneath his blue face paint.

Every funeral is a hole.

Before bedtime, in their two-room apartment on the outskirts of postwar Tokyo, my great-grandfather would tell my obāchan and her siblings ghost stories, like those retold in Aoko Matsuda’s short story collection, Where the Wild Ladies Are.

A car wreck changes you.

The corporate culture of the Cleveland Electric Illuminating Co. is alive and well.

Where I’m from, being a witness isn’t always safe or easy.

Contemporary poetry is haunted by what Keats called, in reference to Wordsworth, the “egotistical sublime.”