Alter-Energies: The Vitalities of Absence in Moby Dick
“Such a world is one of interpenetrating energies—a large, looming but luminous consciousness, in which we ourselves might be but a half-articulate idea.” –Dan Beachy-Quick
All posts filed under: Essays
Prose that encourages us to engage with books of poetry, individual poets, and issues of craft or poetics.
“No country but our century”: Wong May, Poet of Lostness
“No matter how far you stray, your origin beckons you.”
Field Note: Why I Write to Birds
“When I can bring identification from field guide to feeling guide and into another’s conscious as a fellow living being worthy of adoration, the work for that sentence or stanza or story is, for the moment, done.”
A Myth Against Empire
“H of H Playbook is a submission to our collective conscience, a treatise against empire, and a reminder that there is no myth nor story that can replace actual, material human experience.” – Dujie Tahat
The Scribbles, the Rubbish, and the Mirrored Words
“Don Mee Choi’s words point us toward a world beyond the American imagination.” —Woogee Bae
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