In East Winds: A Global Quest to Reckon with Marriage, Rachel Rueckert details her nearly year-long honeymoon, during which she considers the institution of marriage—an unsurprising choice, given her newlywed status. Rueckert’s engaging prose and humor transmit her unflinching interrogation into both cultural understandings of marriage and her past relationships as she unwaveringly pursues answers. […]
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John West begins his lyrical and carefully structured memoir, Lessons and Carols: A Meditation on Recovery, with a kind of road map for the text that will follow: The past unfolds into the present like a flower opening up its petals, revealing its gold-dusted center. Like, in the beginning was the Word, and then, suddenly, a […]
Read More - Lessons and Carols: A Meditation on Recovery
When I was studying poetry at New York University in the 1990s, my friends and I participated in an event called The Poetry Olympics at Brooklyn Brewery. Each New York City grad school was represented by a team that competed in categories including recitation and instant haiku. The grand prize was a keg of beer. […]
Read More - The Hyacinth Girl: T.S. Eliot’s Hidden Muse
Photo by Emily Levine on Unsplash We had some money and we went to Rome. My husband had never been, and I’d just turned forty. It is not possible for me to write the name I called my husband. I don’t remember our endearments. My husband today—someone else—I call Sweetheart, but I didn’t use that […]
Read More - Mirage
We all have our own lines in the world: A circuitous route that marches us around our environs on a walk, a daily commute to work; a border that slashes a partition between one part of land and its neighbor; a journey—or migration—from here to there. How do we read the lines of others? In […]
Read More - A Line in the World: A Year on the North Sea Coast
In this book of essays, Rachel Zucker acknowledges that being heterosexual and white confer privilege that today makes both her and her world so very wrong. But then, even to say she’s wrong is wrong. Yet not saying is wrong, especially for a woman, because reticence is wrong, and then assertiveness is wrong. Every effort […]
Read More - The Poetics of Wrongness
“I was an Afghan named Habib,” writes Matthieu Aikins in The Naked Don’t Fear the Water: An Underground Journey with Afghan Refugees. Aikins is a Canadian-American journalist with over a decade of experience reporting from Kabul. His debut, while an Afghanistan war book, distinguishes itself from other accounts penned by Western media correspondents. Whereas Anand […]
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Last May, I was lucky enough to get to spend a month in residency at Millay Arts, in Austerlitz, New York. The residency takes place at Steepletop, the wild estate (once a blueberry farm in the Taconic Mountains) named after the steeplebush flowers that grow there, where Edna St. Vincent Millay (February 22, 1892 – […]
Read More - Rapture and Melancholy: The Diaries of Edna St. Vincent Millay
Katherine Indermaur’s I|I, winner of the 2022 Deborah Tall Lyric Essay Book Prize, is a philosophical and personal meditation on visual perception. Science, etymology, cultural history, and psychology lend support to supposition in this poetic essay pondering “my own seeing.” In brief passages separated by space and frequently divided by either a black diamond or […]
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Kristine Langley Mahler bookends her debut essay collection, Curing Season: Artifacts, with images of her adolescent self keeping vigil over a suburban neighborhood in Greenville, North Carolina. On the busiest street in the subdivision, where her family lived for four years, Mahler spent hours on her front porch, hidden from view by the overhanging roofline. […]
Read More - Curing Season: Artifacts