American Witches: The Millions Interviews Alex Mar
I realized that the word “witch” has a lot of power for me. It’s a scary word to apply to yourself. There was a little shock to me in the realization that I wanted to go that far.
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A Horribly Marvelous and Delicate Abyss: ‘The Complete Stories’ by Clarice Lispector
Clarice is a writer obsessed with language, how it moves and breathes, how far it can be pushed and pulled apart, how it breaks down.
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My Disease Feels Beautiful to Me: On the Work of Raúl Zurita
Zurita was carrying a file, the poems that would become the book Purgatorio, when he was arrested the morning of September 11, 1973, and the arresting officers suspected his papers might include coded messages. The senior military officer who made the final decision about Zurita’s potentially subversive writings threw the poems into the sea.
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I Found a Way to Enter: Diving Into Writing
I want to look for my entry onto the page, into a line, an image, a something. The seven-plus-minute song “Reflektor” has become a ritual these days. Blast it louder and maybe the portal will appear. Will I dive in?
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Playing Telephone with Emily Dickinson and Paul Legault
Legault transports Dickinson into mostly fortune-cookie length snippets of contemporary English, a dialect spoken widely in urban pockets like Brooklyn, where increasing numbers of the highly educated and literary classes live, procreate, keep each other amused, and make their own cheese.
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My Hour of the Star: On Clarice Lispector
The Hour of the Star is a book I know I will always return to. I am not sure how many times I have read it. I don’t think I will ever have an answer to the questions posed by Lispector’s final novel, all the more reason to read it again and again.
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Anniversaries, Anesthesia, and Elizabeth Bishop
The fixating on being “now exactly at the age” or moment when the anniversary of a terrible thing that happened or didn’t happen that Elizabeth Bishop describes, I know this. The same week I received my copies of the new Bishop volumes edited by Farrar, Strauss and Giroux, I took my three-year-old son to the emergency room.
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