The Scribbles, the Rubbish, and the Mirrored Words
“Don Mee Choi’s words point us toward a world beyond the American imagination.” —Woogee Bae
All posts filed under: Essays
Prose that encourages us to engage with books of poetry, individual poets, and issues of craft or poetics.
Persimmons
“In English, speakers are actors and objects are acted upon. A persimmon is there to be eaten. For Powhatan speakers, it just as likely might not be there since the persimmon, like other objects of the natural world, has an agency and animacy of its own.”—an essay by Emily Parzybok
Mother Lode
“I wanted people to fall in love with nature through words and want to protect it, the way I had as a child, writing on a concrete stoop in a subdivision. In a way, words were my quarry. I mined their layers for meaning, and when I made something beautiful and useful from them, I felt lighter somehow, as if the overburden of living—the debris of its many griefs—had been lifted.”—an essay by Melissa Reeser Poulin
Unmastering English: On the Work of Cathy Park Hong
“Hong’s essays and poems ask how to write about a country’s murderous onset, when the bloody order continues?”—Paul Hlava Ceballos
Such Hints of Honey
“A poem’s sweetness leads to its own devouring.”—an essay by Jehanne Dubrow
When the Years are Gone: On Playlist for the Apocalypse by Rita Dove
“This is a collection about preservation.”—an essay by Luther Hughes
The Underglimmer
“What would the objects around us look like if we were centered, open?”—an essay by John Wall Barger
Everywhere Is [Beautifully] Dreamed in the Poetry of Sherwin Bitsui: A Critical Found Response
“Origin is first origin”—an essay by Natalie A. MartĂnez
Repair
“It isn’t enough to hold someone’s sorrow in your body till it ferments into song. Witnessing isn’t enough. You must become the sorrow.”—an essay by Claudia F. Saleeby Savage
There’s the Overthrow and There’s the Rebuild
“Poems don’t replace the organizing—they supplement it.”—an essay by Troy Osaki