Essay |
“Never Could Walk the Line”
“… probably not many women on this road, driving truckloads of hay, and listening to Johnny Cash, are also contemplating witchcraft …”
Essay |
“A Vision for the Coming Year”
“As the new year approaches, I give myself a tarot reading — 8 of wands — approaching news, arrows hitting their marks.”
Essay |
“Breathing Underwater”
“Here’s everything I know about ecstatic gestures. Fear is fuel. Not-knowing is pure hope. A girl can want to lose her body.”
Essay |
“Mid-April Book of Days”
“At night, you lull yourself to sleep listening to an interview of a woman who studies the brain chemistry of sex and romance. These hormones, the woman says, diminish activity in the decision-making part of the brain.”
Essay |
“Self-Portrait as Blue Self-Portrait: on Noémi Lefebvre, Shame, and Schoenberg”
“… imposter-syndrome feelings constitute the book: worried woman-as-intellectual-outsider; obsessive, anxious woman re-writing previous social encounters; woman apologizing for her opinions …”
Essay |
“The Habits of Eating”
“All that summer after what’s proved to be only a prelude to an endless Mideast war, my children claimed we were the only family they knew that ate dinner together.”
Essay |
“Bad Blood”
“Whereof we cannot speak, silence discovers a word. The Bible says this was true in the beginning. All real poets have said this, too, and all their work is a demonstration of its truth. It is no wonder that philosophers, insofar as they are committed to demonstrate the opposite, hate poets.”
Essay |
Friday Night Fights in Florida: Contention From Wallace Stevens to Jay Hopler
Wallace Stevens traveled to Florida as a businessman for the first time in 1922, and took two-to-three-week winter trips there for the next twenty years, leaving the wife at home. His right hand broke on making contact with Hemingway's jaw at a hotel bar in Key West in 1936, so one assumes he came to…