Essay |
“Small Animal Needs”
“Another story: A beautiful young woman smokes a bunch of pot one night and walks one across a four-lane highway with her little girl to the nearest rundown grocery store.”
Essay |
“In the Garden of Uncertainty”
“I tried to make peace with the fact that my body still had the upper hand, as there was no way to address whether a cancer cell from the original cluster of cells might have stowed away on a blood vessel bound for a distant port.”
Essay |
“The Explosion”
“Right after the explosion, the newspaper interviewed me. So did a lawyer. He was seeking damages on behalf of the victims. The newspaper article reported that I had run into the house, though I had only gone under the carport.”
Essay |
“Robert Musil & the Crisis of the Artist in Times of Ideological Polarization — the 1920s & 2020s”
“His attempts to bear witness, his notes for articles never published, the speeches he actually dared to give … show Musil struggling mightily under the strained tug of war between reality and possibility, freedom and censorship, fear and bravery.”
Essay |
“How Poems Change Us”
“I think of a poem’s shifts or transitions as tectonic … gliding plates that adjust and change the ground one stands on but with the acceptance of an embrace.”
Essay |
“The Value of Fear: Why We Should Listen to Robert Frost During the Pandemic”
“Frost doesn’t write about overcoming fear. He writes about experiencing it and then making decisions based on the evidence.”
Essay |
“The Nearness of Falling”
“A scientist claims that the increased stress of our modern life may be withering the hippocampus. During depression, it seems to shrink, contracting from the drought of optimism.”
Essay |
“Before I Let You Go”
“One year, my class, known as problematic for being easily distracted and causing disruptions that made us hard to teach, wasn’t assigned a homeroom teacher hired to break us. Mr. Lovette, that teacher, lacked bulk and a bulldog face.”
Essay |
“I Found A Tarantula”
“As Dylan writes in the prose poem ‘Ape on Sunday’ — ‘tho I might be nothing but a butter sculptor, i refuse to go on working with the idea of your praising as my reward — like what are your credentials anyway?'”
Essay |
“Confessions of a Pareidoliac”
“Imagine trying to find your way with a compass that wants every direction to be north. This is more or less where we are, perceiving the world around us by means of instruments that find patterns everywhere.”
Essay |
“Panta Rhei”
“We all wind up making our gods, and then turning into our gods, and then the other way around again, ad infinitum.”
Essay |
“The Reading”
“Atmospheric, was what someone’d said when it was all over, which I repeated the next day on the phone to M from Spain who was talking about the Argentine and his fetishes.”
Essay |
“Patience”
“Birdwatching is the neighborhood sport. It’s ‘exercise even,’ their shaggy, silver-haired neighbor Eddie says at the patio table, ‘with all that looking up and pointing.’ He’s got two bright rows of teeth he keeps readjusting.”
Essay |
“Fragments from Dancing in Russia after The Fall of the Berlin Wall”
“There are many Palaces of Culture in Russia. We rehearse in six of them. All have grand entryways but the bathroom floors are flooded with brown water.”
Essay |
on “Poems Not Written” / a recurring feature On The Seawall
“But the more I looked at the draft, the more squeamish I got. Wasn’t this a gross appropriation of a survivor’s narrative?”