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"You can use language and be absolutely true to what you’re saying, and at the same time people have an opportunity to misread it as something scintillating or shocking or surprising."

Last March, Lucie Brock-Broido died at the age of 61. She left behind four collections, and the work within was characterized as “spooky,” “haunted,” or some version thereof when she was eulogized in every publication from The New York Times to The Paris…

To “stet” is the act of making a textual change and then changing it back and so on and so forth. In the spirit of “stetting,” Stet also acts as a means of reinventing language, just as Malech attempts to reinvent her own voice through this collection.

“When I built my first stretcher, it was like finding a big surprise. It let me reinforce what I had been doing with painting, which was playing around with points of tension, ideas about the canvas as a fabric, as something I could manipulate and explore different possibilities with, not just within the gallery but also with the rectangle. Painting didn’t have to be just rectangular—I really wanted to challenge that.”

Samuel Johnson’s Eternal Return demonstrates how beginning with a familiar object of interest (a quirky nineteenth century novel, for instance) can lead—if followed rightly—to a site of novelty and abundance.

I once drove around southwest Arizona with a photographer named Pedro, from Mexico City. His specialty was making ethnographic forays into North America, and on this trip he was studying the culture of RVs—recreational vehicles—and their owners. In the…

My old friend and former teacher Steve Orlen and I walked many miles together along the wide avenues of Tucson, Arizona. Our promenades usually took place after the dinner hour, in the evening, when the blazing heat of the Sonoran day had at last relented. An evening breeze would finally have arisen, and the little desert sparrows flew back and forth between the lofty crowns of the palm trees that line those streets.

I think of poetry as musical language, close to every day speech but of a higher order, with a system of notation.

That exalted moment when, out of nowhere, you are obliterated—completely, blissfully destroyed—by a voluptuous euphoria. A lightning flash of inspiration. That is white heat.