Articles

I found this rehab notebook from 2006 buried in a box, skimmed through it, and found a dozen questions, some of which turned into poems, but all of which left me thinking about my life in ways they didn’t at the time (for obvious reasons).

We follow the girl through escaping a Bosch painting, walking into Lake Michigan, and going to hell in an overnight bag among other dystopian futures that each seem incongruent with one another. But linking all of these potentials together is the yearning to be loved that the girl expresses within each image, line, and phrase of the book…

I love it that the rasp takes on its own identity and exhibits all the loss of desire that comes with the aging process, like a stiff mink with its teeth frozen open.

The best way to write is to write. So better don’t talk about it. Finish something you started because that is always a first draft.

Breathing tightly, encased in slippery yet familiar bark, this poetry collection evokes reflection on the legacy of geo-political turmoil of the Kurdish people without delineating an intellectually overwhelming timeline chock-full of statistics.

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.