Essays

Essay |

“December”

“Books don’t prepare you for what’s coming. Manuals for pregnant women must have been written by mothers completely drugged by love for their children, without the slightest pinch of critical distance.”

Essay |

“Friendship on the Page”

“… the continuous intertwined narrative of a reciprocal exchange between just two correspondents … I found exactly that in the correspondence between William Maxwell and Eudora Welty.”

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“The Depths”

“Two years have passed since my electroconvulsive treatments. No longer eating or sleeping, I had slipped under the ward doors as a ghost.”

Essay |

“On Glamor”

“‘Glamor’ means magic, derived from ‘grammar’ (fr.); since in the Middle Ages scholars, i.e. grammarians, were ‘viewed with awe’ by the vulgar (who couldn’t speak Latin).”

Essay |

“Diversity: A Garden Allegory”

“The covenant for our homeowners association specifies that what I’ve done around my house is technically prohibited. There should be fewer wildflowers in my yard. Banish the milkweed.”

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“Metaphor As Illness”

“Illness is obscene in its reality. No wonder we hurry to clothe it in metaphor, to drape it in wooly lengths of symbolism.”

Essay |

Life’s Work: on the Poetry of Jane Mead

“Jane Mead brought her five books of poetry and 14 new poems into To the Wren: Collected & New Poems, 1991-2019. She died less than a month after its publication.”

Essay |

“Making Wondrous” and “Now This Light”

“… the newborn foals leaping for the first time into the tree-line, that bandwidth of blood-red marking the whole world with her precious hooves like notes of earth music and Nureyev song soaring in the saplings of her legs …”

Essay |

“No Finer Form” and “Misfits”

“Then they argue over whether Poseidon or Neptune is the god of the sea, refusing to believe that it’s both.”