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“Soap: Art of Failure”
“What if instead of saying we have failed we say that we are failuring? What if a practice of imagination is often also a practice of failure?”
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“Fairfield”
“But there was something in the dirt, in the water, my mom’s cousin Troy said — a toxic fallout that made its way into the bodies of the people.”
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“Bad Faith, Obsession, and Guns: on Reading Lady Wing Shot by Sara Moore Wagner”
“Whereas I’ve spent my life avoiding guns, Wagner faces them straight on. As it turns out, both of us had something to learn from Annie Oakley: ‘She knew to not look at the gun, but at the thing, / to point at what you wanted until it fell / at your feet.'”
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“Medicinal History on the Eve of Our Future”
“Galeano, obsessed with actual facts, concludes about America: insofar as Latin countries remain underdeveloped, it’s because of centuries of looting and exploitation by Europe and the U.S.”
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“Motherboard”
“… this is the first time I’ve descended into Adelaide at night rather than day. I’m stunned by its squareness, by the rigid lines of its hyper-planned grid system.”
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“The Man in the Red Car”
“One day, two federal agents in suits knocked on my door. I can’t recall if they said they were with the SEC or the FBI, or whether these were local agents who had been farmed out. They assured me my father wasn’t in trouble …”
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“Facing It”
“I used a heavy, faux-bone-handled butter knife to knock along the spine, dislodging even more unidentifiable, frangible stuff. Still there was something rattling around inside …”
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“A Feast Afloat”
“Aboard our family’s 35-foot Ohlson yawl, Carousel, my mother was St. George to the alcohol stove’s dragon. She fought valiant battles to light it, at times igniting billows of blue flame and shrieking and cursing at it like the true salt she was.”
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“Hand With Head”
“Art’s development, like culture in general, is anchored in a system of interconnected realities none of which is fully controlled and explained by rationality and linear causality.”
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“On Naive and Sentimental Poetics: an Introduction, with reference to Rachel Blau DuPlessis”
On Naive and Sentimental Poetics: an Introduction, with Reference to Rachel Blau DuPlessis I don’t know how to write about poetry. That’s where I begin. I write poems, but I’ve never been what’s called a “poet-critic.” And I do write something resembling scholarship, but my scholarly work has never been about poetry. So, I…
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“All Elegy: What Are Poems for in a Destitute Time?”
“I find myself asking, what can a poem possibly do to confront or alleviate or expose the climate crisis? How can the poem possibly avoid the hazard of merely “making us aware,” an increasingly helpless and self-indulgent realization.”
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“Appraisal”
“Having clipped it from the classifieds, my mother showed us the ad: Cash for Class Rings — This Weekend Only. Most households still subscribed to daily newspapers then, retrieving the bundles from lawns or landings and yanking off green rubber bands to flatten them out before reading.”
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“Bad Seeds”
“Pop a seed into your mouth and you enjoy an elfin sip of its juice, tart and sweet at the same time. In an instant, the pleasure is gone and you’re left with only the white core, bitter and unpleasant to chew.”
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“History” and “Warranty”
“After years of couples counseling, we finally bought a new mattress. After the first night, he said he didn’t like it and went back onto the mattress in the guest room. And I felt relieved.”
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“Unmoored: A Meditation”
“Weeks have passed since the evening explosion in a neighbor’s attached garage, the fire that followed consuming the bulk of their house before the volunteer firemen’s hoses were even unspooled.”