Everything

First things, first. Full disclosure: Tom Sleigh was my teacher and thesis advisor at Hunter College. Fuller disclosure: my admiration for Tom’s poetry outweighs any personal loyalty to Tom (though I have that too). * * * Tom Sleigh’s method is art, but his end is anthropological. His vision is fully humane, an attempt to [...]

I had a few reasons to pick up Geraldine Brooks’ new novel Caleb’s Crossing. First, it’s a new book by a semi-important author, which has received mostly good reviews in major newspapers. Second, it takes place at Harvard, and I thought it would be a good read for my trip there for a conference. But [...]

After Catullus and Horace only the manners of centuries ago can teach me how to address you my lover as who you are O Sestius, how could you put up with my children thinking all the while you were bearing me as in your mirror it doesn’t matter anymore if spring wreaks its fiery or [...]

Okay! Fine. Tea Obreht is a veritable prodigy, and The Tiger’s Wife is uncannily good. Most (no, all) reviewers, as well as the likes of Colum McCann, TC Boyle, and Ann Patchett, say no less. But this novel is not just good for a twenty-five year old. Most of us would kill to kill it [...]

Canoe How might we & the waters labor over now the new naming of the rapid by those who first travel that stretch of river named rightfully The Bronco after the tributary from the South & also after the way in which they advise it be treated as a Bronc be loose in the hips [...]

Dear James, Everyone here is talking about you—myself included. Most of it is the expected back-and-forth, will-he-won’t-he sort of thing, though, personally, I like to imagine you will, and that (because you are, I assume, exactly like your character on Freaks and Geeks), you’ll be slumped over in the back of Intro to Doctoral Studies [...]

City Lights Books just published Compression & Purity, a new poetry book by L.A.-based African-American surrealist, Will Alexander. Alexander writes densely textured “psychedelic” or scientific surrealism with a strong affinity for arcane vocabulary. “On Scorpions & Swallows” begins: Not claimed by the accessible as contrast or as competition by loss or mathematics by peril but [...]