And yet, like poetry, wrestling too is a practice of excess, of the unjustifiable and the unnecessary: the costuming, the tanning, the crafting of a distinct style in service of a vision of what becomes necessary in order to get through the day or death. 

The evening you refused to sleep, we were over a hundred miles away from our home in Cleveland. A Rust Belt city to which—because of you—your mother and I will forever be tethered. 

For the critic-comptroller—the spectator hoping to take absolute measurements and gain new and unambiguous knowledge from the show—the works on view inspired both hyper-focused reading and diverted desire.

Close listening, much like close reading, requires focused, sustained attention to how a story is told, not merely its plot. The work of healing, if not the biophysiological process of cure, is fundamentally narrative in practice.

It’s fitting that ecstasy’s Greek root means to literally “be beside oneself,” as in the soul exiting the body. Rubens wasn’t wrong: death, near-death is a preemptive condition of the ecstatic.

There was one literary magazine that made you write “THE END” at the end of your story, to signify that when the writing was done, when there were no more pages or writing, it had ended to these idiots or robots.

What I needed was to connect the best way I really knew how: by talking about books, sharing feelings about a story with someone, and through those discussions learning how their mind works and in turn my own.

An undercurrent of low-grade moral panic is at the crux of both the fascination with and knee-jerk disparagement of SAHGFs: in their own words, they have gone soft and vocally do not wish to succeed in any kind of career.

During the years I had cancer, I sometimes bristled at the language of “wellness” and its trappings. I didn’t need mindfulness; I needed oxaliplatin.

They’re a potent reminder that we still live in the long, dark shadow of the twentieth century—the bargains made therein, the general Faustian demeanor accepted as a national character—and that a certain kind of serious, Modernist fiction still has a place and resonates.

But we’re ready to set sail for summer, and we hope these pieces, this review-in-review, have persuaded you that we’ll be here again in three months, in a year, in a decade, bailing and assessing the course.

Against this backdrop, it was only a matter of time before the gospel of flat design spread to the publishing industry. But what does “frictionless experience” look like in book form?

On my television set, Calum sits naked at the edge of his hotel bed, sobbing uncontrollably until his body convulses into a familiar shiver. You can’t see her, but it’s implied that his young daughter Sophie is somewhere nearby, witnessing her father’s breakdown.

From the crumbly yellowed 50s-era pages, out came tumbling the most delicate assortment of objects: a collection of movie tickets for the Cleveland Cinemathèque, an unsent letter to a “K” about a dream that the writer “T” had, and the fragment of a short story that had been clearly abandoned.

You’re a poet who’s been at it for a while: you’ve published ten or fifteen books over thirty or forty years, and you’ve won prizes. You’ve had critics call you an Influence. But not lately.

Attention Library: the phrase verges on redundancy. But unlike in most libraries, where the act of attention is a means to an end, in this Library attention is the main attraction: one visits the Milcom Room to attend, as it were, to attention itself. Is such an exercise possible?

“Next Year” can still be exciting to us because of how it occupies the material it’s made with, and what that kind of occupation might have to say about the way we read both poems and calendars.

The switch from adventuring to gardening’s a growing up: the hero sets out as witness, one who has read knight’s tales and is instigated to action. Reader becomes writer; on return, the hero testifies to the history of his vision.

Have I just described a typical scene in a Harold Pinter play, or an especially difficult moment of interaction for an autistic person? 

The show wants to ask: they were decent apples once, so why did they go bad?