Articles

Jacob M. Appel’s stories on murder, gator wrestling, hormonal teens, love struck seniors and whales that swim upstream confound our present and convince us to distrust our nostalgic pasts.

Montgomery works to flip the script of “madness” to a narrative more in tune with cultural dialogues that refuse to prescribe away different perspectives.

In beautiful yet economical prose, Doyle takes the haziness of “nights like that, with boys like that” and imbues each scene and story with horrifying specificity.

Often my work revisits myths and fairy tales — I have written about Persephone, Eros and Psyche, Hansel and Gretel, Don Juan and Adam and Eve — and oddly, most things I write seem to include someone eating a piece of fruit at some point.

Something I’ve often thought about as a writer is the “undepictability” of abuse, or perhaps I should say the difficulty it presents for readers.

In most of my other essays, I am constantly asking “what counts as work?” It’s a question about gender, a question about the body, a question about values, a question about money, and a question about government.

I’m always looking for intersections between disability and literary imagination.

A scarcity of the kind of books I most want to read has kept me writing—books that rely heavily on the imagination, that thumb their metaphorical noses at form and genre, and that make an aesthetic delight of difficulty.

Schneider admits that he has stolen, “Hasn’t everybody?” Of course we have. It’s the justification of the thievery that is of interest in these poems.

It’s freeing to have the knowledge that yes, you can (and should) probably burn most of your writing away, leaving only the good bits.