It was my mother who taught me that hummingbirds don’t sleep: they fall into a state called torpor, which is deeper than sleep, more akin to hibernation.

Hard at work in a culture more dedicated to vocational mythologizing than repairing structural supports.

Palacios’ lyrics carefully excavate, document, and interpellate through such questions, interrogating what a peopled coexistence could possibly mean when, amidst modern exigencies.

I feel jealous of Toby Altman for being so obsessed with this topic, which makes his poetry a “serious project.” I worry I am only serious about my love for people.

I’m a little out of the loop.
Before the service, I buy breath mints
instead of flowers.
I wear the wrong shoes.
I leave my facial tissue in the car.

Running through “There’s Always This Year” is a strong biblical motif. God (sometimes capitalized, sometimes not), savior, prayer, mercy, miracles, redemption, salvation, and eternity all permeate the book.

By making Müntzer a scapegoat, Catholics and Lutherans cemented his reputation as an uncompromising iconoclast. This image only made the preacher more appealing to later generations of radicals.

We must go beyond the tired narratives of cultural exploitation or commercial gentrification that tend to dominate discourse.

It is both within the custom of writerly sight, then, and a cruel irony, that Berger, whose popularity is most connected to Ways of Seeing, would later come to develop cataracts in both eyes.

I couldn’t see anything but I could hear that the pasture was now moving, alive with women. I started to run before a hand stopped me, landing across my chest.

In Death Glitch: How Techno-Solutionism Fails Us in This Life and Beyond, technology scholar Tamara Kneese, director of Data & Society’s Algorithmic Impact Methods Lab and former green software researcher at Intel, explores the precarity of our data and digital selves.

Style is sexy, but without its earthly trappings—the meaty, earthy details that give texture and life to a novel—it floats away as soon as the book is shut.

disproportion
in this arranged
and animal world

Armen Davoudian’s first full-length book, The Palace of Forty Pillars, shows for the first time in far too long what meters and rhymes and inherited forms, used deftly and clearly to speak of real lives, can do.

The Downward Spiral, a record explicitly concerned with the decay that issues from indulgence, was recorded in the house that killed the 1960s, in the city that projects image over substance, where glamor circumscribes and hides destitution on a daily basis, in the state that makes consummate the double nature of the frontier as both the height of American exceptionalism and the embodiment of its most brutal expansionist tendencies

When Pittsburgh refuses to see the world, the city becomes unbearably precious and self-congratulating; and when Pittsburgh refuses to see itself, it takes as truth each insult it has ever received.

If you are deeply offended by Bratton’s decision to adapt Shakespeare’s historical masterworks into a novel about incest, addiction, and fucking, consider what he was up against.

To do so would call into question the political viability of Bertram’s poetic practice, which is stuck at the level of the model, taking it as a given and merely tweaking the parameters.

Buzzati makes a case for the necessary limitations of the “wretched flesh” in which we experience life, experience that cannot be reduced to the digital binary—singular experience.

I hugged constantly for five years. It made me a better angrier man.