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"The idea that dolls offer girls a prefabricated range of options for what they can be, rather than a set of objects on which to play out wishes and fears, aggression and desire, grants an enormous amount of psychic power and civic responsibility to corporations."

—Ari M. Brostoff in N+1

The short answer is, we need a kinder relationship with ourselves, and by extension, a kinder relationship with each other. Your work on hustle culture and burnout informed my thinking in that I see beauty culture as hustle culture that’s reached into our bodies. Hustle culture as applied to disciplining or modifying our bodies isolates us from one another because we end up in competition, looking over our shoulders, and scared to ask for help when we need it. It’s a recipe for inequality and marginalization on one end, and anxiety and exhaustion across the system.

Elise Hu in conversation with Anne Helen Peterson

And where the octave allowed the sentences to breathe through enjambments, here all of the lines are end-stopped; the periods that end four of them feel like slamming doors. All of this is important because, even before we process what the lines are saying, we can feel how different they are, and that tells us something about the speaker. A central belief: when sentences are working well, in poetry or prose, they function like the orchestral textures beneath the vocal line of an aria; they become psychology. The syntax has changed because the speaker’s psychology has changed.

Garth Greenwell (’s Substack is a blessing) on an Henri Cole sonnet

“Regardless of its nostalgic Americana, tradlife’s vision owes less to Norman Rockwell than Thomas Kinkade: the glitter is cold, and the insistence on perfection almost hysterical. Rockwell, even at his most idealized, still populated his work with people and their hijinks; he was interested in the capacity of individuals to surprise each other. Meanwhile, in its videos and photos of well-lit, private spaces, tradlife makes property rather than humans its central object. As in Kinkade’s paintings, the house appears as a refuge from others.”

Zoe Hu in Dissent Magazine

“We want the ascendancy of style over substance, as if there were a difference, and frankly, we want to be moved.”

Sam McKinniss on the Alex Katz Guggenheim show

My poem “Two mothers and I work lunch shift” at the New England Review—

My poem “Honeymooning” is a Ruth Awad Poetry Pick at the Southern Indiana Review!

““Try to get new language // closer to that of thought. River beneath appearances. Poems.”

Alice Notley

Caryl Pagel in conversation with Zach Savich

“Paired with an off-hand, cool resourcefulness similar to O'Hara' s is a delight in Stein-like language play and experimentation. She has taken Williams's notion of the "variable foot" to heart, almost every poem a reinvention of rhythm to create nuance and voice. Thus her fondness for the collagist "found poem" (a genre that for her includes journal entries, letters, postcards) or for the "imperfect poem," one that reveals its edges, difficulties, hesitations.”

Susan McCabe: Alice Notley's Epic Entry: "An Ecstasy of Finding Another Way of Being"

“Childhood,” like so many other abstract concepts, can become an idol, and then demand the very resources and attention needed by the actual beings for whom it is supposed to stand in.

Phil Chrisman in Plough: On Being a Good Ancestor

“In Evanston, Peter and Basil spend all their working hours together in a truck. When it is time to commence the day’s labor, one will say to the other “butta time, supper time” a seemingly nonsense string of utterances, the exact meaning of which is never made explicit. These expressions, when said by characters who spend their working lives in near-constant proximity to each other, seem to emerge from oft-repeated clichés like “this job is my bread and butter” or “time to put dinner on the table” that over time evolve, or perhaps dissolve. Closeness erodes formal language, imbues utterances with private meaning. These moments of dialogue intentionally resist literal interpretation, instead transmitting the feeling of life passing in the presence of another—life spent seeing, thinking and speaking with others.”

On Will Arbery’s plays in the New York Times Magazine

“The questions it asks about elite consumption have been answered with exotic images and more consumption.”

All Hat No Cattle: On The Marfa Invitational Art Fair in the Cleveland Review of Books

“The auction also declares Didion’s unusual and special relationship to things, one we might learn from. Things are treasures. Her collection of seashells is a little aching; you can imagine her strolling some nearly empty beach, gathering them over the years. Each shell is the memory of some walk taken with a long-ago friend, of ideas first thought up and pains shared. It isn’t merely that seeing Didion’s stuff turns you romantic—the pieces are evocative. She pours meaning into her possessions, but seeing her possessions all laid out for us suggests there was something within these objects that she was waking up or unleashing with her tasteful mind. A handful of her favorite books are estimated to sell for $800-$1200, and I regret to inform the aforementioned skeptics among us that I would not be surprised if her Celine sunglasses sell for as much or even more than the bundle of her favorite books. And really, what’s wrong with that? Seeing them ghostly, disembodied, they are just…so…cool. A chilly center, a shield against the world. How could any woman or person who loves literature, even casually, resist the pull of such a jewel?”

Rachel Tashjian in Harper’s Bazaar

“My point is simply that Yanagihara remains at heart a travel writer, if not an unreconstructed one. She seems to sense that wealth can be tilted, like a stone, to reveal the wriggling muck beneath. In a few cases, she is even making a political point, as with her abiding interest in the colonization of Hawaii. But more often in these books, wealth’s rotten underbelly is purely psychological: There are no wrongful beach houses in A Little Life, no ill-gotten hors d’oeuvre. Luxury is simply the backdrop for Jude’s extraordinary suffering, neither cause nor effect; if anything, the latter lends poignancy to the former. This was Yanagihara’s first discovery, the one that cracked open the cobbled streets of Soho and let something terrible slither out — the idea that misery bestows a kind of dignity that wealth and leisure, no matter how sharply rendered on the page, simply cannot.”

Andrea Long Chu on Hanya Yanagihara

“Yet any distinction—like David Tracy’s, between the Protestant dialogical imagination, which emphasizes God’s absence and unknowability, and the Catholic analogical imagination, which emphasizes God’s presence in the things of the world—blurs when we begin to consider particulars.”

Phil Metres in Lit Hub

I. Here’s a Truck Stop Instead of Saint Peter’s Bedridden from blistering, hallucinatory fevers in Moscow, 1992, I first listened to R.E.M.’

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