Central to Beast at Every Threshold is the question of one’s identity and place—the poet writing against disappearance, but also to weave a tapestry of loved ones and influences. To choose …

It is not Lee’s intent to trivialize any type of death or trauma by juxtaposing the simultaneous banality and brutality of isolation; it is perhaps not even Lee’s intent to distinguish between …

Inter State is infused with some of the same passions many of us youth poets had back then, not just for our craft, but for our immediate surroundings—for our respective slice of the City or the …

Among the many significant collections of poetry that plunked into the roiling depths of 2020 was Lucille Clifton’s How to Carry Water: Selected Poems, put out by the late Clifton’s longtime …

It's hard to talk about dance and not talk about music. By applying poetry to dance, I create a score that’s particular to my body. I am skeptical of universality; I believe that our lives are …

There is always a mystery in literature; not every question can, or should, be answered for the reader. It takes away the power, pulls the punch, to have such a personal experience (as reading) …

To make metal is to take the earth apart. The process of taking and refining the materials needed for the manufacturing of electronics, including life-saving ones, often irrevocably disturbs and …

That's what I usually try to do with my books. I have a horrible or wild thing happen then have the characters scrambling to hold their lives together because I feel that's how most people are …

We need to elevate queer stories, but when do we even unconsciously designate what gets to be a queer story? The more we resist accepting stories of queer characters who act less morally or ethically …

DeLillo’s signature postmodern discomfort is a bad fit for a book that claims to offer “mysterious resonance” with our current, tumultuous moment. In a time when we lack human warmth and …

In Marie-Helene Bertino’s new novel, Parakeet, an unnamed bride stands before a traditional threshold—marriage to a man—but the plunge she ends up taking is far more subversive. Following the …

Yours, Jean initially presents the reader with a seemingly placid world populated by average people who find their values tested by unexpected circumstances and look for ways to solve their problems …

After I got an agent and published my first novel, Orchid & the Wasp, I started writing short stories… but then I went back to this old manuscript—The Wild Laughter. I tend to throw things away, …

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 …

“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 …

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 …

. . . a collection of flash fiction detailing the rich, diverse inner lives of mostly Malay Singaporeans, through which Alfian Sa’at dismantles the monolithic caricature of what a Malay is or ought …

Self-described on Twitter as a “queer mutt poet,” Mann’s poetry tangles with corporate culture, queer identity, and ownership. His new collection, Proprietary (Persea Books, 2017), treads water …

So often Snediker’s poems parse the speaker’s lone-/someness even as they parse syntactic units blown across the page. The space created in each poem is deeply felt, the absence between each word …

Mai Der Vang’s debut collection, Afterland , is an unforgettable and evocative book. The poems are full of smoke and ghosts, the kinds of lingering that make history manifest. The voices of these …