I know that I can never purchase the identity I feel stripped of by histories of immigration and assimilation and gaysian self-hatred. This doesn’t make silk less pleasurable or persimmons less delicious.

I didn’t remember ever actually introducing myself to Lizzie, didn’t remember telling the barmaid about my tenuous tenure in what passed in X for an art world, though I must have, at some point, because there she always was, hovering stern and sudden above, everything she wasn’t asking me aloud blaring through her glare.

The power of poets is often measured in books, but only particular poems from their oeuvre engender the possibility of their eternal greatness.

Can there be a reparative mode of reading the earth, Dreaming seems to ask, that draws us into an epoch of the geopathic? Or a mode of repair that does not draw from the paradigm of work and working?

He manages to embed an impressive amount of personal information in unexpected places, leaving the reader to wonder what is real and what is imaginary. Moreover, and often in the same piece, the writing can move from very funny to strangely poignant.

"Let me duck out of the olden days that I may be free now / somewhat over the choppy waves.

I think I'm really interested in things that iterate and shift depending on context, depending on vantage, depending on perspective, depending on relation. So maybe that's what some of that is.

While she positions herself as an inside critic fed up with the excesses of the left, and as someone who embraces Marxist ideas herself, her recent work demonstrates serious confusion about the nature of exploitation, one of the most basic Marxist concepts.

Without a premature claim to any kind of sagacity—that is, with all due humility, I begin to understand the epigraph to J. Salter’s final novel.

The too-familiar process by which the commercial mainstream comes to subsume always more peripheral cultural elements is one of Kunzru’s compositional black holes. The question of how to make art in conditions of stalled futurity is another.

As a reader, it’s flattering to be let in: to understand that the writer is playing with expectations, starving you a bit of plot, feeding you a ton of side dishes instead of a meat and potatoes dinner.

Last time I saw her, it was also during hurricane season, I said—there to inspect the land before it got washed away, I thought. She wanted to see what our constructed world was like before it was leveled again.

Like those whosay  light  accumulates — step closer understanding that weshudder at what youbuild.

When the body is only a body in fantasy, speech acts are the only acts possible. Words are slippery and the narrator is twisted up in them like sardines.

I imitated a cormorant’s wings with my elbows, flocking with the birds, then I turned to walk home alone.

It often seems like this is not a book in praise of excess so much as one deathly afraid of it. Everything truly excessive is neutralized, sublimated into rarefied high culture and righteous philosophy. Sometimes shit is worth just staying with.

I didn’t settle upon philosophy out of some dispassionate search for meaning; I turned to it because I felt like I was drowning and was desperately searching for a life preserver.

There is a Beguine spirit in renunciation. But without a God for whom they can gouge their eyes out, Nicholson’s speakers become not separate from the world, but marked by it. They let it in with a private sense that they may not really be of it.

In revisionist feminist art and literary histories, a premium is placed on the young, suicidal woman

Falling out of love, with an object as much as with a person, is a rupture between the past and present selves.