Features

The Post-Apocalyptic Counterrevolution Will Not Be Televised

If it’s true that the world’s poorest will disproportionately suffer the effects of climate change, we are engaging in a kind of philosophical counterrevolution, undoing the modern idea that the masses matter at all.

The Generic Life

On POETS IN THEIR YOUTH, a newly republished memoir by Eileen Simpson, John Berryman’s wife.

The Personal and the Believable

Fanny Howe and Shabazz Palaces are strange bedfellows, but this summer their shared orientation helped renew my belief in the world.

Going Viral

Alena Graedon’s THE WORD EXCHANGE and Ben Marcus’ THE FLAME ALPHABET explore the traumatic capacities of language by imagining it is a virus.

Reading Tolkien’s Beowulf and Reliving My Own

Each translator must decide what sacrifices are most acceptable to make, because those sacrifices will define the translation.

David, What Shall I Do?

Amid Midwestern megachurches and half-built subdivisions, my obsession with Bowie was gritted into a secret pearl.

Police Unreality

The police uphold the law in the same sense that a poltergeist upholds a cabinet as it drifts menacingly through the air. Cops don’t uphold the law, they haunt it.

Agents on the Beach

Immerse yourself in work and life, daily writing and editing and analyzing life until the world opens up again and offers details and ideas for the world you’re writing.

Dyer’s Straits

Present throughout Geoff Dyer’s ANOTHER GREAT DAY AT SEA is a desire to be subsumed totally in one subject or task, anything that will obliterate the ego and its demand for a paralyzing abundance of choices.

Babelsprech International: Capital “I”

If our life is our labor and all our interactions are poetry, then what does this mean for poetry?