On short poems, in The New York Times

It’s hard to create mystery in just a few lines, but not at all impossible, and many poems here are delightfully baffling, like “The Gazelle Calf,” by D.H. Lawrence: “The gazelle calf, O my children,/goes behind its mother across the desert,/goes behind its mother on blithe bare foot/requiring no shoes, O my children!” I have no idea what significance this image had for Lawrence — he seems moved and upset by the calf for reasons left outside the poem, which functions like a sigil in chaos magic: a wish condensed to a symbol sufficiently removed from the wish such that you can forget what it was, then pursue it without conscious desire.

On self-pity, in POETRY

Bugs are useful figures in the literature of self-pity—bugs, that catchall category that includes insects and spiders and things with a thousand legs, any loathsome, creepy creature that dwells in the dirt under rocks or the slime of a drain. I once heard, anecdotally, not from an entomologist or anything, that stink bugs, an invasive species with “long, piercing-sucking mouth parts” as one pest management handbook puts it, are notorious for hanging out in spots where they are likely to get smashed and killed, such as a doorframe. Recently my husband found one perched on the edge of a tissue poking up from its box. “That’s convenient,” he said, using said tissue to crush it, then throwing the wad in the toilet. How Jude-like, these stink bugs. They must know they are stink bugs: a Kafkaesque nightmare.

On beginnings, in The New York Times

The beginning of a work is a kind of Big Bang. All the energy is there — the rest of history is there, insofar as the universe of the poem is concerned — it just has to play out in time. I often have the sense that the beginning holds all the information of the project. If I can start, I can finish; the next move will become clear, but only once I’ve made the first move. In this way the poem is a miniature determinist universe, but one (like ours) so chaotic as to be unpredictable, even to the writer. But poems can also start more than once. As Jean Valentine writes, in her poem “Cousin,” “Once or twice, someone comes along/and you stand up in the air/and the air rises up out of the air.” The poem begets more poem, a bubble universe.

“A Place for Fire” in the Paris Review

When I was twelve or so, my parents converted their wood-burning fireplace to gas. The idea was that it would be so much easier to light and extinguish that we’d use it more often. But the fireplace lost almost all of its appeal. It no longer gave off any real heat, and it didn’t smell delicious—it didn’t smell like anything—and worst of all, it didn’t crackle. I love the sound of a wood fire, and I got through many a winter in that Denver apartment by burning a special kind of candle with a crackling wooden wick, and by playing ASMR white noise videos on YouTube with names like “Cozy Reading Nook Ambience” and, my favorite, “Crackling Campfire on the Windy Tundra of Norway.” My family’s new gas fireplace offered no drama. As Jun’ichirō Tanizaki once wrote of electric heaters, “without the red glow of the coals, the whole mood of winter is lost.” After the conversion we only lit a fire once a year, on Christmas, and in a perfunctory fashion. In Providence, I thought we might have to settle for a gas fireplace. But most houses we looked at had no fireplace at all. And with interest rates increasing, we couldn’t afford those houses either.

The Best Poetry of 2022, in the New York Times

Reading a lot of books in one genre, too close together, can start to drive you senseless, the way saying the same word over and over drives sense from the word. I can get to this point with poetry, especially reading many poems from the same year. Literature is a cliché-generating machine — we belong to the age, we sound of its spirit. Yet, every year, some books shake me out of my zeitgeist hypnosis. They send me back to reread and keep giving up more meaning, not less. They generate language, and meaning, in me, too — when I love a book, I want to describe it.

On Jorie Graham, in the New York Times

If you’ve ever taken a psych class, you may have seen an instructor hold a blank piece of paper up in front of the room, then wad it into a ball, the whole flat 8.5-by-11 sheet made compact inside a fist. The point of this demonstration is to show why human brain tissue is crumpled rather than smooth. It allows greater surface area to fit in a small space: more brain in the skull. You might also note how the opposite corners of the page can now touch. More folds mean more connections, more speed, more power — a good metaphor for poems. Verse (from the Latin for “turn,” as in turn of the plow) creates more folds. Lines call attention to the surface area of language, the words that brush against one another as they file into their pews, not just the words next to them but above and below them too. Lines accordion more meaning into narrow margins. “This spiral staircase/made of words,” Jorie Graham writes self-referentially in the poem “Root End” — a helical shape being the most efficient use of space when you need to climb a story.

“On Beginner’s Luck” in Lit Hub

There’s a question, a craft question, that I’ve thought about for years and have never been able to answer: If there’s a line in a piece of writing, whatever the genre, that tells you “the point” of the piece, should it be in the piece? I sometimes think you should just say the thing. Clearly and directly. It may be the most quoted, most underlined part of the writing. Other times I think you don’t have to say the thing—not in a single sentence—because the piece as a whole implies the thing so strongly. The thing, the point (insofar as any piece of writing can be said to have a point), emerges from the writing. It will appear in the mind of the reader as a matter of course. And yet other times I think it doesn’t actually matter, and that I know a piece is done when I can take “the point” out or leave it in and the piece feels equally good either way. You can say the thing or not—the thing is still there.

“Why Write?” in The Paris Review

Then there’s the question of whether the pain comes from writing or the writing comes from pain. “I’ve never written when I was happy,” Jean Rhys said. “I didn’t want to … When I think about it, if I had to choose, I’d rather be happy than write.” Bud Smith has said he’s only prolific because he ditched all his other hobbies, so all he can do is write—but “people are probably better off with a yard, a couple kids, and sixteen dogs.” Here’s Williams again: “Writing has never given me any pleasure.” And then there’s Dorothy Parker, simply: “I hate writing.” I love writing, but I hate almost everything about being a writer. The striving, the pitching, the longueurs and bureaucracy of publishing, the professional jealousy, the waiting and waiting and waiting for something to happen that might make it all feel worth it. But when I’m actually writing, I’m happy.

“Dream House” in Epoch

When I was a little girl, I used to hide things in my room, a few coins or a piece of candy or a strip of Skee-Ball tickets, in the hopes I would forget I had done so and find them later, like buried treasure. I had my doubts, even then, that I’d manage to wait long enough to forget. But doubt, I now know, is faith; wished belief is belief. I had a nun-like streak: my mother often mentions that she’d find me sitting quietly alone in my room, doing nothing, and I’d tell her I was punishing myself. She finds this very funny, but I always think, My god, what had I done?

“Chance, Design and Inevitability in Three New Poetry Books” in The New York Times

Some people believe that before we are born, we choose our own parents. In a poem called “The First Number Will Be a Blues,” Sommer Browning describes one version of this story: “Before we’re born, my mother tells us, / We watch movies of every life we might be born into. Then we choose. / The little baby points from her / astral cradle.” The speaker marvels at the implications: “I choose that mama. / I choose that daddy. / I choose that irrevocably broken marriage, / That accident that wires my jaw shut, / That burned popcorn” — the litany continues — “That root canal, that unending night on mushrooms, / That dog bite.” “That DUI.” Is it absurd to imagine we select our own pattern of suffering, or that we might have picked a life without any? As Willard Spiegelman notes in his book “Seven Pleasures,” “‘Hap’ means chance.” Happiness and happen share the same root. Whether we choose them or not, the random happenings of our lives, good and bad, are our own. The details that add up to days and years — your street name, your first word, your favorite podcast — have what Ernest Becker might have called a “cosmic specialness.”

“The Shape of the Void: Toward a Definition of Poetry” in The New York Times

Adding breaks to a paragraph is not always going to make an interesting poem — but most poets don’t write that way. They write in the line, in the company of the void. That changes how you write — and more profoundly, how you think, and even how you are, your mode of being. When you write in the line, there is always an awareness of the mystery, of what is left out. This is why, I suppose, poems can be so confounding. Empty space on the page, that absence of language, provides no clues. But it doesn’t communicate nothing — rather, it communicates nothing. It speaks void, it telegraphs mystery.

“A Poem (and a Painting) About the Suffering That Hides in Plain Sight” (on Auden’s “Musée des Beaux Arts”) in The New York Times

Each time I return to it, I’ve read a lot of other poems in the interim, which change and expand my reading. But I’ve also done more living, so I understand more about suffering myself. Pain is a kind of wisdom, maybe. As I age, I’m making the poem better.

“The Lyric Decision: How Poets Figure Out What Comes Next” in The New York Times

The poet Andrew Weatherhead once tweeted, “The best way to read a poem is to pretend each line is the name of a horse; so the poem is just a list of horses.” This joke says something serious about poetry. It calls attention to the line as a fundamental unit, which in some sense always stands alone — the next line could always be anything.

“The Leap” in Grand Journal

Whether I’m reading or writing a poem, when I get bored, I tend to think it’s because the poem hasn’t taken the leap yet. That little move I think of as “the leap.” It’s not the same as the volta exactly, the turn you expect in a sonnet. It’s the moment where the poem kind of makes you raise your eyebrows or sit up straighter in your chair and maybe even feel a little afraid. A poem can take multiple leaps, but I love most when a poem takes a leap around the third line—when around the third line the poem suddenly becomes a lot more interesting. Because that’s right about where I would give up and stop reading if it didn’t do some little dance step or party trick, something to get my attention and remind me what poetry is for.

“The Best Poetry of 2021” in The New York Times

This year of slow and careful re-emergence has felt, to me, like an odd one for books. There was so much abundance that it taxed our attentions, and even highly anticipated titles seemed to come and go quietly. I wish I had more space to highlight all of the books I read and loved in 2021, but these seven collections were personal favorites, and the ones I most want to share.

“A Field Guide to Productivity Apps” in The Believer

Why am I writing about productivity apps? I wanted to think about productivity. I wanted to meditate on my low productivity over the previous year, at least compared with my usual output. Before the pandemic, I’d always been able to manage both my day job and a writing career, and to do both rather well. I suddenly felt I was doing both badly. I didn’t really lack time. We weren’t traveling at all, and my social life was greatly reduced. But I felt I had lost my mind—not that I’d gone insane, but that the part of my mind I use to write wasn’t there, or couldn’t be accessed. So few of my thoughts were interesting to me. I feared the change was permanent, that my creative mind was not just injured but dead, dead tissue that would have to be removed.

“Louise Glück’s Stark New Book Affirms Her Icy Precision” in The New York Times

I once heard someone comment that no one ever talks about how funny Louise Glück is, which alarmed me so much that for some time afterward, I would randomly think quite loudly to myself, “That’s because she’s not.” Glück’s intensity repelled me when I first encountered her work, as a student — think of the stern insistence of “Mock Orange.” At the time I was attracted to playfulness, irreverence, anti-poetry. Now that I’m older, have suffered more and realize my life is likely more than half over, it’s her seriousness, her coldness, that appeals. Some days, and in the dark intervals between days, it seems to me that Glück’s preoccupations are what poetry is for, that poems are confrontations with the void. If we’re on a moving walkway approaching the void, we can ignore it, avoid all thoughts of it, for only so long. And death is serious — “there is no such thing as death in miniature,” she writes.

“Seeing and Being Are Not the Same” (introduction to The Voyage Out) in the Paris Review Daily

Helen and Rachel initially regard each other with mutual underestimation. Scant formal education has allowed Rachel to flourish in music, as she simply pursued her own interests. But she knows almost nothing about the world—her lack of schooling leaves her with “abundant time for thinking,” but thinking is not equivalent to experience—which baffles and frustrates Helen. Meanwhile Rachel’s ageism is such that she imagines the middle-aged are ready to die: “ ‘My aunts said the piano would come through the floor, but at their age one wouldn’t mind being killed in the night?’ she enquired.”

“For June Jordan and Muriel Rukeyser, the Arc of Moral Verse Bent Toward Justice” in The New York Times

What is poetry for? It might be the overwhelming question of poetry, to borrow Prufrock’s turn of phrase. What does it do, why does it matter, how can it matter, what is it for? Because reading a poem is less fun for most people than watching a movie or listening to music, it seems to need to justify itself as an art form, to offer some cultural use value above and beyond pleasure. Hence the enduring popularity of “I, too, dislike it” and “Poetry makes nothing happen” in essays on the uselessness, the hatred of poetry — suggesting that these lines, at least out of context, do have some use value.

“A Complicating Energy: Notes on a Year Without Strangers” in Harper’s

I’d been having insomnia on and off, but one week my sleep was disrupted in disturbing new ways. I would start to drift off, then be jolted awake as if someone had stabbed a syringe of adrenaline into my heart. I had the terrifying thought that if I did fall asleep I would die, and that my body somehow knew this and was trying to keep me alive. The next day, exhausted, I described this experience in very vague terms to a woman I work with. She asked me whether it felt like I was being electrocuted from the inside. I was stunned. It had felt like that. After our phone call, I googled something like “electric shock feeling while falling asleep.” I found an article about brain zaps, which are typically a symptom of antidepressant withdrawal. But I have never taken antidepressants. Could it be that I was in withdrawal from my own normal brain chemistry, I wondered, my pre-pandemic levels of serotonin and endorphins? My intrinsic antidepressants? I googled the symptoms of morphine withdrawal. Anxiety, rapid heart rate, trouble sleeping—they sounded like the symptoms of anything.

“In a Sister’s Elegies, Proof That the Art of Losing Can Bring Comfort” in The New York Times

My affinity for grief books seems related to my childhood obsession with the survival stories, labeled “Drama in Real Life,” that I read in my grandparents’ Reader’s Digests — tales of people trapped in an avalanche or stranded after a plane crash — and my enduring attraction to addiction memoirs, haunted houses and roller coasters. We seem to enjoy proximity to strong emotions even when they’re negative. In this system, artificial fear feels good. Vicarious misery is almost pleasure, a miserable pleasure. Sobbing through a film, or screaming on a carnival ride, provides catharsis for everything you haven’t sobbed or screamed about in your own life.

“How Poets Use Punctuation as a Superpower and a Secret Weapon” in The New York Times

I’ve always loved when a poet makes a punctuation mark her own — take Emily Dickinson’s dashes, typically standardized as em-dashes in print, though in her handwritten originals, the marks were more ambiguous, some appearing more like sloppy periods or commas, some lines slanted like slashes or even vertical, suggesting an idiosyncratic diacritical system. Alice Fulton invented a punctuation mark, a double equal sign she called “the bride” (a name for the background threads that give structure to lace) or “the sign of immersion.” In a 2010 interview that I’ve returned to many times, Fulton relates these to Dickinson’s dashes (the bride is a “dash to the max”) and to A. R. Ammons’s colons, glyphs that are “both present and silent,” “reticent yet visible.”

“Best Poetry of 2020” in The New York Times

I’m uncomfortable using the word “best” on a list — in part because I am just one person whose tastes are subjective. More so, to me it implies that I’ve read every book that came out in 2020 and can therefore rank them like brands of peanut butter (which seem more finite). I didn’t read them all, or even close — I wish my life made that possible. Still, I couldn’t pass up the opportunity to talk about some poetry books that I loved this year. My column gives me limited space, so apart from the books I’ve already had a chance to recommend, here are several collections that I wasn’t able to write about in full or otherwise feel deserve more attention.

“The Year in Self-Googling” in Hazlitt

One Friday this summer, I absent-mindedly opened a tab and started typing my name—it had become the kind of habit that is almost automatic, like adjusting your glasses, which I sometimes try to do when I’ve already taken them off and put in my contacts. It was likely there was nothing to discover, and of course if there was, there was every chance it might ruin my day. I have an exceptionally google-able name. There are not, to my knowledge, any other Elisa Gabberts. Most of my writer friends have to compete with other entities—a poet named Justin Marks, for example, is outranked by a race-car driver. Another poet, Chris Tonelli, has edged out a music theorist of the same name. The most famous Gabbert is Blaine Gabbert, a quarterback. We’re probably distantly related; it’s an uncommon surname, an Ellis Island bastardization of the German Gebhardt. Blaine is the first suggestion if you google just “Gabbert.” On this particular afternoon, an idle curiosity made me pause after typing “Elisa”—I wanted to see who the famous Elisas were.

“The Intolerable, I Guess” (Poetry Foundation)

But Plath also had a vulnerable, defeated side, laid bare in the privacy of her journals. When she lost the 1959 Yale Younger Poets prize to George Starbuck—her former drinking buddy, if the term can apply to martinis at the Ritz—she found the irony awful: the editor said her poems were too “rough,” when she’d worked so hard to break herself of technical perfection, what Plath herself called “archaic cutie tricks,” at the expense of emotional force. She had wanted her poems to be more like Hughes’s. “Will I ever be liked for anything other than the wrong reasons?” she wrote in her diary; “I have no champions.” Of course, she had many, throughout her life. She published poetry, fiction, and criticism regularly in high-profile publications such as The Atlantic and The Observer; she had a coveted first-refusal contract with The New Yorker. But defeat came and went like a mood: the tides of failure. For Plath, success often felt like a failure—like the wrong success, too commercial or obscure; success insignificant, compared to her husband’s; success badly won; success too late.

“Sometimes, the Funny Thing About Poetry Is the Poems” in The New York Times

If the question is not unanswerable, the answer seems to be that the right to tell a “rape joke” belongs to the victim — and there’s subversive power in using the formal properties of the joke to complicate, rather than trivialize, trauma. Humor can be used as a defense mechanism (“The rape joke is you went home like nothing happened, and laughed about it the next day and the day after that, and when you told people you laughed,” Lockwood writes) but it’s also a reclamation of control — a refusal to be told how to feel about your own lived (and relived) experience.

“On Miranda Popkey’s Topics of Conversation” in The White Review

Alcohol plays a large role in this book, in these characters’ lives – they are always sipping something, sipping and shrugging, lighting cigarettes and exhaling. Wielding their props, they feel a little like props themselves; after being processed by the narrator’s memory, they exist solely in service to the narrative. At first it feels like an authorial tic, a lapse of control, but as the novel progresses, it comes to feel more like an excess of control, as though the narrator, or author, or both, were moving them around like marionettes. If some of the characters, these wounded women, are similar to each other, it may be because they’re all facets of the narrator’s mind, like the cast of a dream. They are doubly fictional. There’s a Freudian streak in this novel: multiple characters are either psychoanalysts or seeing psychoanalysts. This is conversation as talk therapy – or, as Adam Phillips might say, the narrator is ‘redescribing’ people from her past both to figure out a problem and to make her life more interesting. If the therapist isn’t there, she has become more interesting to herself. An unreliable narrator is a brain in a vat – a novelist is too.

“Safe” in The Yale Review

Since early March, when the country began to shut down in various degrees, I’ve often thought about how much of “normal life” I took for granted. If I needed something, or simply wanted it, I could just go and get it. I had never appreciated that my routines, in my largely white and middle-class neighborhood, weren’t dangerous. I know this thought is not original—in fact it strikes me as profoundly unoriginal. In fact it seems like most people I know have been having all the same feelings in the same order. First, I feared my parents wouldn’t take the risk of the virus seriously enough. I started talking to them almost every day—pressuring my father, an internist, to close his office—and after a few weeks, a little less often, when we ran out of things to say. Nothing new was happening. I watched a movie on my laptop, hyperaware of how often the characters touched their own faces. I had an anxiety dream that I’d forgotten about social distancing and accidentally gone to a party. I had a wish-fulfillment dream about grocery shopping, filling my cart with specialty meats and good olives at the deli. I went on a walk and felt like I was playing a live-action video game, trying to stay six feet away from other walkers and joggers at all times, while also trying not to get hit by a car. When I told my friends these things, or shared any recent observation or impression, they always said, Me too! or Exact same. We were all struggling to focus on reading and on work—our mostly inessential work which we were still allowed to do, on the internet at home. We were having the same dreams.

“For 3 Poets Who Embrace Excess, the Mess Is the Message” in The New York Times

This rather dazzling six-page poem operates like a run-on sentence, free-associating and changing its mind (“but actually ~ no ~ / no to wanting someone else / to do the work for us”), trailing off conversationally (“I don’t know man … was I wrong / to assume I was straight?”), throwing shade at a viral Paris Review essay (“did someone with this level of professional achievement / actually agonize for three weeks / over watching that scene in Annie Hall”). The poem is pissed off (“the more I talk about my pain / the more white people literally profit”) and its speaker feels trapped (“I hate this reality but neither / will I just die”). It’s as though career success is a capitulation to capitalism, hence a kind of failure — hence this book must hate itself. Zhang’s messiness is defiance: a refusal of standards (in America, necessarily white standards) of “beauty” and “quality” and even evidence of effort, a refusal of the burdensome standard of the “model minority.” It feels important that some of these poems are extraneous. One, called “jenny’s trying,” is just one line: “why hide?” Cutting “My Baby First Birthday” down to a typical 70-ish pages would work against its project, an assertion of the overflowing self and a denial of containment.

“Sick Sad World” (an excerpt from The Unreality of Memory) in Harper’s

Viruses and bacteria hijack our minds; they make us act weird. For example, Toxoplasma gondii, a parasite found in cat feces, makes mice less afraid of cats; this is an evolutionary strategy, making it easier for the parasite to get from the mouse to the cat. When it spreads to humans, it may increase their risk-taking. One study found that people with toxoplasmosis, the infection caused by the parasite, “are more likely to major in business.” An NBC News story suggested optimistically that the parasite “may give people the courage they need to become entrepreneurs.” 

“Poems from the Storm: On Climate Poetry” in the New York Review of Books

Twenty years ago or so, when I first encountered the poems of Charles Wright, I noticed how often they begin with a description of the sky, of clouds or the moon or what the birds are doing and in which trees—he is always observing the firmament from his porch and then having profound thoughts about time. There was still a sense, back then, that the sky was the sky—ever-changing and yet changeless. Now the sky in a poem must be “terrifying,” a symbol of impending doom. Storms—weather—come from the sky. Weather is the prototypical boring conversation topic; climate too will become boring.

“Hoarding Instincts” in Real Life

Since early March, when a number of basic household necessities — along with small luxuries I’m accustomed to, which seem suddenly necessary — have become difficult to obtain or outright unavailable, I’m feeling the tug of a hoarding instinct. I don’t want the luxuries that feel normal to change. I don’t want what feels normal to change any faster than it already is, especially at home, where I’m safe as long as I never leave.

Entry for “Pandemic Journal” in the NYR Daily

Cooking is the only time I feel normal. I made a curry with the halibut, and topped it with the last of a bunch of fresh mint we had in the fridge. The next night I made pork chops, grits, and kale, and the following night I made a hash with the leftover pork. There’s something pleasurably game-like about figuring out what to cook every night, starting with whatever’s most perishable, limiting what I take from the freezer or pantry, incorporating scraps or a bit of sauce from previous meals, recursively. We’ve been eating well, so far, at least.

“Jacket Required: On Phil Collins’ Yuppie Rock” in the March Badness tournament

There’s a scene in the 1984 action/romance movie Romancing the Stone where Michael Douglas and Kathleen Turner take shelter in a wrecked cargo plane in the jungles of Colombia. The plane was transporting weed, a kilo of which he proceeds to throw into the campfire. Stoned, they get to chatting, while the Douglas character (“Jack T. Colton”) idly flips through an old issue of Rolling Stone he finds in the plane. He sits up and cries out, “Aw, goddamn it man, the Doobie Brothers broke up.” (I found this line hilarious as a child, though I could not possibly have understood almost anything about it—who the Doobie Brothers were, when they broke up, what “doobie” means or the effects of marijuana—I think we must appreciate the formal properties of jokes before we understand their content.) I bring this up because the movie ends with Jack buying a boat—paid for by selling the giant emerald that was eaten by an alligator they had confronted in Cartagena—so they can literally sail away together. The fantasy of boat life was fundamental to the yuppie dreams of the 80s, and at least as important as the fantasy of sailing itself was the fantasy of being able to afford a boat.

“In Defense of Poetic Nonsense” (On Alice Notley’s For the Ride) in The New York Times

A lot of recent books fall into this microgenre: climate-aware, speculative poetry, mixing the fantastical with what you might call dystopian realism. These books take place in hell on earth and are nostalgic for the present. There’s a sameness to them. It’s no one’s fault; you don’t know you’re writing the zeitgeist when you’re in it, and then it’s too late — like all those people in the ’70s who named their daughters Jennifer. My best friend is a Jennifer, and I often think of her mother explaining how novel it sounded at the time, and how regal, a variation on “Guinevere.” When she said that, for a flash I heard the beauty in the name.

“Nostalgia for a Less Innocent Time: On the Glory and Depravity of Hair Metal” in the Paris Review Daily

Gene Simmons might think fame is the best, but I’m much more interested in the banality of fame, its emptiness. In my favorite hair metal videos, fame is exhausting, lonely, and boring. (Vince Neil said that he understood why rock stars have such big egos when he first played for a giant stadium crowd: “From the stage, the world is just one faceless, shirtless, obedient mass, as far as the eye can see.”) The banality of fame is best captured by the tour montage, an especially popular choice to showcase a power ballad. Take Bon Jovi’s perfect video for “Wanted Dead or Alive,” which has it all, in slow-motion—the grainy black & white footage of hands holding up lighters and flashing the sign of the horns; the women in the audience screaming and sobbing and lip-synching, one clutching a single drumstick; the band dragging themselves on and off different modes of transportation, gazing contemplatively out the windows of planes and buses; Jon finally collapsing after the show, dripping with sweat, on a sofa backstage. It’s exhaustion pornography—exhaustion as a trophy of excess.

“A Death-Haunted Poetry Book Mulls Life’s Reversals of Fortune” in The New York Times (on Mary Ruefle’s Dunce)

In “Dunce,” her latest poetry collection, Ruefle confronts the extraordinary yet banal fact that all of us die. How do we reconcile the boringness of death-in-general with the shock of our own, specific death? “I am walking in the general direction / of things,” she writes; “I was nothing / and shall be nothing again.” To live is to walk in death’s general direction. Death is our destiny, the Hollywood ending for each of us — what could be more predictable? And yet. (My favorite Issa haiku: “The world of dew / is the world of dew. / And yet, and yet—”)

“The Uncanny Child” in the Paris Review Daily

Horror movies are full of silent, glaring children—the demonic little blondes in Village of the Damned; the twins at the end of the hallway in The Shining; tiny telekinetic Drew Barrymore in Firestarter. Part of the creep factor of the silent child is that we don’t know what they’re thinking. Are they judging us? Scheming? A truly silent child stares like a doll. In his definitive essay on the uncanny, Sigmund Freud mentions a woman patient who “even at the age of eight” was still convinced that “her dolls would be certain to come to life if she were to look at them in a particular way, with as concentrated a gaze as possible.” What’s uncanny about a living doll or a doll-like child is not the realization of a childhood fear, Freud argues “the child had no fear of its doll coming to life, it may even have desired it.” Rather the doll reminds us of “an infantile wish,” the wish to make something true just by thinking it—desire as a power in itself.

“I Want to Ride a Dragon” in the London Review of Books (on Andrea Lawlor’s Paul Takes the Form of a Mortal Girl)

As Polly, Paul does things Paul wouldn’t do; he cries easily, for example. He feels things Paul wouldn’t feel: ‘A flutter of shyness … girl-feelings. Weird.’ Midway through Orlando, Woolf writes that her protagonist ‘was becoming a little more modest, as women are, of her brains, and a little more vain, as women are, of her person’. This can partly be attributed to fashion: ‘Vain trifles as they seem, clothes have, they say, more important offices than merely to keep us warm. They change our view of the world and the world’s view of us.’ Polly’s clothes and altered body do the same kind of work, femming him inside and out, just as calling himself Polly casts a spell. (The novel’s epigraph is from Gertrude Stein: ‘Call anybody Paul and they get to be a Paul.’) During this stretch of the book, we may start to think, as Paul does, that he’s really, ‘like, chemically or something’, a woman – that he’ll settle in a true, final state. He follows Diane to Provincetown but she breaks his heart (‘You want to be everything, all the time … I just want a girlfriend’), and he goes back to being a guy and moves to San Francisco. The novel keeps changing just as Paul keeps changing, trying one form and then another, on a quest for narrative experience that mirrors his quest for sexual experience, for sex as novelty (‘What was sex but newness?’). Pleasure is important in this world – Paul’s world, Lawlor’s world, our world – pleasure as a radical end in itself. But Paul seeks love too, or if not love in a traditional form, then the transformative connection that suspends our native loneliness.

“Proust and the Joy of Suffering” in the Paris Review Daily

I am always struck by depictions of happiness in wartime, in the darkest conditions—in Chernobyl, in concentration camps. In Family Lexicon, a memoir of life under fascism in Mussolini’s Italy, Natalia Ginzburg writes: “Lola used to remember with great longing the time she spent in prison. ‘When I was in jail,’ she’d often say. She would recount how in jail she finally felt tremendously at ease, finally at home and at peace with herself.” She considered it the “noblest time of her life.” Ginzburg’s father, during bombings, “wouldn’t go down into the shelters … Under the roar and whistle of planes, he ran hugging the walls with his head down, happy to be in danger because danger was something he loved.” When his father returns from a stint in prison, he seems “happy” to have been there. The people in her life treasure their worst experiences; the worst is the best. It’s a form of resistance, to refuse to have pleasure taken away from you. But I think, too, there’s something fundamentally life-affirming about proximity to death. We grow nostalgic for our pain, once it’s safely in the past, because pain’s intensity makes regular life look banal.

“In ‘The Octopus Museum,’ Brenda Shaughnessy Sees a Cephalopod Future” in the New York Times

At times this book almost wallows in guilt, in the performance of self-flagellation. “Tell myself the weather ruined my plans, though it’s me ruined the weather’s,” Shaughnessy writes in one poem, and, in another, “I’m ashamed of us all.” In “Sel de la Terre, Sel de Mer,” the speaker addresses an octopod or a jellyfish: “Oh funny, runny little god who lived in the sea we cut to ribbons! Tell us the big story with your infected mouth. Tell us the big story is so far beyond us we can’t possibly ruin it.” “Here,” another speaker tells her hungry, bored daughter, handing her a pencil, “chew on this. … It’s all yours, darling.” It feels like a challenge to the reader: Chew on this, chumps. We made this hell and now we have to sleep in it; it’s “well-deserved.” Are these poems preachy? Do we deserve a poetry that isn’t preachy? And what’s the alternative? Raboteau writes, of her own children, “It’s pointless to question whether or not it was ethical to have them in the first place since, in any case, they are here.” That doesn’t feel quite right either. It’s a feature of apocalyptic living: There’s no right way to be.

“The Stupid Classics Book Club” in the Paris Review Daily

“You think you know, but you have no idea.” That’s the catchphrase for an MTV show called Diary that I’ve seen exactly once. In that episode, we follow Lindsay Lohan around for a day to see what her life is supposedly really like. Every time it cuts back from commercial, we hear Lohan saying the catchphrase. I think it should be the catchphrase for Stupid Classics Book Club too. I thought I knew, but I had no idea. It was trendy for a while to publish lists of classics that “you don’t have to read.” In 2018, GQ named twenty-one books, including The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, Gulliver’s Travels, and the Bible, that “you don’t have to read,” with suggestions for what you should read instead. Lit Hub published a list of “10 Books to Read By Living Women (Instead of These 10 By Dead Men).” Since when is it poor form to die? I find these lists incredibly tiresome. Of course, you don’t have to read anything. Some books will be triggering or make you deeply unhappy; there just isn’t enough time. But if you want to speak or write knowledgably about them, you really do have to read them. You can’t just assume you know what they’re like. I’m glad I read Fahrenheit 451 even though I despised it. Now I know exactly how it’s bad, and I can hate it for the right reasons.

“On Classic Party Fiction” in the Paris Review Daily

In Edith Wharton’s The House of Mirth, the element of unreality is achieved by the tableaux vivants, elaborate live reenactments of Botticelli’s Primavera and Tiepolo’s Banquet of Cleopatra. With their “happy disposal of lights and the delusive interposition of layers of gauze,” the tableaux “give magic glimpses of the boundary world between fact and imagination.” Lily Bart appears as Mrs. Lloyd, the subject of a Sir Joshua Reynolds painting—the guests are titillated and a little shocked (“Deuced bold thing to show herself in that get-up”), so I always pictured something more typically male-gaze-y than the actual portrait, not a woman reclining but standing up, fully dressed, and carving her husband’s name in a tree. In any case, it casts the necessary spell to carry Lily and Mr. Lawrence Selden away from the party, “against the tide which was setting thither,” past faces that “flowed by like the streaming images of sleep,” so they can kiss and whisper of love. Classic parties often have a watery quality. Nick Carraway is surrounded by “swirls and eddies of people” he doesn’t know. It’s the wet, blurry view through the bottom of a glass.

“Weird Time in Frankenstein” in the Paris Review Daily

Because of this nonlinear storytelling, we’re left to puzzle out just what Victor was up to during his monster’s intellectual coming of age. It’s tricky in part because the emotional texture of their experiences was different. The monster’s years feel richer, thus longer, to the reader; they held more joy. But from inside the experience, Victor’s years full of fear and regret would surely have felt longer than the monster’s happy ones; pain elongates time. On the other (other) hand, these were the first two years of the monster’s existence; time is elongated in childhood in part because each day accounts for such a large proportion of one’s lifetime so far. (There’s also a theory that because children’s hearts beat faster, “their body clocks ‘cover’ more time within the space of 24 hours than ours do as adults.” Would this apply to Frankenstein’s monster? Maybe, if his love for the cottagers quickened his pulse.) Can there be true simultaneity in fiction? In what sense do narratives that unspool at different times “happen” at the same time? Some of Shakespeare’s plays seem to operate on two contradictory time scales, a phenomenon critics have dubbed “double time.” But then, there’s no true simultaneity in the real world, either. Here’s Wikipedia’s enchanting ur-voice on the relativity of simultaneity: “According to Einstein’s special theory of relativity, it is impossible to say in an absolute sense that two distinct events occur at the same time if those events are separated in space.” (At one point, the monster quotes from Percy Shelley’s poem “Mutability,” which makes no sense at all, since the narrative takes place before the poem was written.)

“Against Completism” in the Paris Review Daily

I’ve always thought of some writers as “hot” and others as “cold,” my classic example being Plath versus Anne Sexton, Plath the controlled ice queen and Sexton the sexy, messy one. But it’s only Plath’s poetry that’s chilly; her journals and letters are lusty and overabundant with feeling, with overabundance. (In a funny but mean review of her recently published volume of letters, Jeffrey Meyers describes the “awkward” size and binding of the “massive volume,” just one of two, the second of which will appear “to stupefied readers next fall.”) It’s hard to square Plath’s prose with her poetry, the way its hard to square her image in photographs—the beaming, teacher’s-pet cuteness—with her deep, resonant voice on those spell-binding BBC recordings, where she sounds absolutely merciless, a dark sorceress. But her icy poetry is still intense, still burns to the touch—“black and glittering,” as she writes in “Burning the Letters,” from Ariel; “My veins glow like trees.” In comparison, “Mary Ventura” feels lifeless, lukewarm.

“On Writerly Jealousy” in the Paris Review Daily

In “For Me Alone to Read” (2007), Marías writes of the irritation of finding that your favorite art or artists have other fans. After naively believing “we were the only people who knew them, or at least the ones who best or most truly understood them,” we learn that “many other readers, viewers or listeners are familiar with these books and have perhaps felt the same, and then you cannot help see these others as ‘usurpers’ or ‘copycats.’ ” I’ve had a slightly different worry, that once someone more famous than me has written about “my” subject, everyone will think that I’m the copycat. For Marías—who I guess doesn’t have to worry about writers more famous than him—this having-to-share is worse when the others are “people we don’t like, or whom we detest or despise, or who strike us as arrant fools.” Again, I feel differently; the pain of sharing is more poignant when I see the writer who got there first was at least as interesting on the subject as I might have been.

“That Formal Feeling” in the New York Review of Books

The late American poet Bill Knott, who used to teach a class on poetic forms at Emerson College in Boston, knew an exercise, or perhaps you could call it a trick, by which you could turn any poem into a sonnet. Choose a poem (your own or someone else’s) of about one hundred words, then locate all the rhyming words and write them in a column. You’ll find that any unrhymed poem (take “Leaving the Atocha Station,” by John Ashbery) is likely to contain some rhymes (bats/rats, scarecrow/window) and slant rhymes (prayer/hair, amnesiac/enthusiastic). Next, try to arrange the pairs into the rhyme scheme of either a Petrarchan or an Elizabethan sonnet, and rewrite and reorder the lines accordingly, using synonyms as necessary to fill in the missing rhymes. Finally, nudge the syllabics, so that the lines are about ten syllables each—extra points if you can make the feet iambic. You’ve created a sonnet, or something like it.

“Time, Money, Happiness” in The Smart Set (from The Word Pretty; you can hear me reading this on the Denver Orbit podcast)

At 36, my relationship to time is complex. I’ve always been hyperaware of it, but when I was younger, I so often wanted time to move faster. I dreaded boredom more than anything. Now there is something exquisite about boredom, the slowed passage of time. In my 20s I loved to sleep late on the weekends — till 11 was ideal. Now I’d much prefer to wake up early to read on the couch for several hours, with coffee, before making breakfast. It makes the day (and hence the life) feel longer. There is even an element of pleasure to insomnia, a break in that stretch of unconsciousness. Only in waking can I appreciate the pleasure of having slept. Would a bigger bed, and deeper sleep, make me happier, or just more content? Contentment isn’t happiness.

“The Great Mortality” in Real Life

Whenever a story on the threat of an “extinction-level event,” like an asteroid or comet headed for Earth, is making the rounds, people quote-tweet it to add, “Finally, some good news!” In this age of horrible news all the time, we get it instantly: Ironic suicidal ideation. But there’s something kind of real behind it — the fantasy of the swift death, the instinct to just get it over with. Of course, the asteroid that killed the dinosaurs didn’t kill them instantly, unless they were at ground zero. It wasn’t “IPU annihilation,” to use philosopher Galen Strawson’s term: instant, painless, unexperienced. It took tens of thousands, possibly even hundreds of thousands of years of living on a sick and barren planet before they all finally went extinct. This makes the prospect of death by asteroid much less merciful.

“Letter of Recommendation: Recently Returned Books” in the New York Times Magazine

So much of what we encounter each day is designed to influence our decisions and purchases, but the books on this shelf have no agenda. They are not being pushed by the publishing industry. There is no marketing budget behind them. They’re not trending on my social-media feeds or selected by a recommendation algorithm. They were not chosen to signal anyone’s intellect or righteousness or in-the-know-ness. They are often old and very often ugly. I’ve come to think of this shelf as an escape from hype, a kind of anti-curation.

“Is compassion fatigue inevitable in an age of 24-hour news?” in The Guardian Long Read (also available as a podcast)

If you have ever cared for a sick parent, or child, you might recognise the symptoms of increased stress: the bad sleep, bad moods, bad stomach. I have experienced compassion fatigue as a caregiver myself. My husband has a chronic illness, and when he started getting ill, several years ago, we didn’t know what was wrong. He would be struck with sudden vertigo and trapped on the couch, panicked, for hours. On other days, he was too dizzy to drive, or too unsteady to walk without a cane. Even more worryingly, his hearing started fluctuating, the levels changing from day to day, sometimes better in one ear and worse in the other. This made his work particularly difficult – he was teaching at a university at the time. Throughout it all, he had roaring tinnitus, which he compared to hair dryers, vacuum cleaners, jet engines, sirens, and on one occasion, a UFO landing. Some days he could barely hear anything, and it seemed that any day, he might wake up with no hearing at all, unable to work or communicate, even with me. John was in his 30s.

“Big & Slow” in Real Life

It’s hard to know — and easier not to think about — the effects that all the nuclear materials on the planet could have on people, other organisms, and the environment over the course of hundreds of thousands of years. This kind of time-delayed destruction is what the writer Rob Nixon calls “slow violence,” a violence “that occurs gradually and out of sight … dispersed across time and space.” Nixon’s book Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor explores how processes like toxic drift, global distillation (also known as the grasshopper effect, which causes pollutants to accrue at the poles), and the acidification of the oceans unfold so slowly they “can hinder our efforts to mobilize and act decisively.” The emphasis here is on action — not the object per se but the work it does. An idea as large and amorphous as global warming blurs the distinction between object and process: To look at the moving object we have to pause it, which renders it inert, allowing us to contemplate it passively.

“Crash Course” in the New York Times Magazine

The explosion at the Chernobyl nuclear power plant in 1986 has often been described as the worst nuclear disaster in history. But there are records of several larger and more destructive catastrophes. In “The Age of Radiance,” a history of the nuclear era, Craig Nelson cites a 1957 plutonium-plant accident in the Ural Mountains that irradiated an area 14 times as large as the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone. There are other examples, too, but these accidents weren’t publicized, because they took place in the U.S.S.R. during the secretive era before glasnost. So what makes Chernobyl history’s worst? It’s the fact that we all know about it.

In other words, our collective reckoning of what is or isn’t a disaster entails publicity. Disasters are news because they are news.

“Doomsday Pattern” in Real Life 

When Chernobyl exploded, workers at the plant and in the nearby town of Pripyat experienced something very like the Trinity test: a purple and pink glow in the sky; a fresh, clean smell like ozone. “It was pretty,” one witness said. They went out and watched it from their balconies like it was an L.A. sunset. If they were quite close, they tasted something metallic. You see this over and over in reports of radiation exposure — a taste of metal, like tinfoil, or in one case, “a combination of metal and chocolate.” Cancer patients receiving radiotherapy describe the same sensation. It’s not the flavor of waves or particles but a phantom taste — a sign of nerve damage.

“True Crime” in Real Life

For years, I’ve believed there are two kinds of happiness. On the one hand there’s the happiness of stability: a good job, a loving family; dependable American-dream prosperity. On the other, there’s the happiness of intense experience: dizzying highs and crushing lows in quick succession. My theory is that when we’re young, we prefer the second kind of happiness; we take a lot of risks because the lows improve the highs. As we get older, as the pressures of conformity increase and the lows take their toll, we strive for the first kind of happiness. But we continue to prefer our painful memories — stable life may be happier, but unstable life is more interesting. It’s almost as though being happy day to day doesn’t make us happy overall.

Believing this scares me, as much as the news scares me. I worry that, despite the wages of stress on my body — my blood pressure is higher, my gums are receding — I’ll look back on this whole awful year with nostalgia. Nostalgia, etymologically, means “homesickness” or “return-home pain” — again, there’s the significance of place. But I also find that the “pain” part of the word (algos, as in fibromyalgia), the longing part, bleeds over into the “return home” part — I’m not just nostalgic for my past, I’m nostalgic for my pain. My own past suffering can be a great source of comfort. Why is that? Because it’s over? Or because it’s a badge of honor?

“On the Pleasures of Front Matter” in the Paris Review Daily

Good introductions are full of these grand, seemingly unprovable (and undisprovable) proclamations: a near aphorism acts as a self-dare to the author, whose challenge is to back it up with the book. I like to collect them as theories, like perfect lines of poetry that require no evidence other than themselves.

“How to Be Pretty on TV: The Idea of Beauty in Anne of Green Gables” in Lit Hub and Little Boxes: 12 Writers on TV

You notice it here, and in her audition tapes, which are also on YouTube, and of course in later parts of the show when Anne has aged and come into her own, that Follows is very pretty, even beautiful. I used to think it was a remarkable stroke of luck that they managed to cast a homely adolescent who would turn out to be beautiful, just like in the books. How foolish of me! Now I can see she has the same face and the same body from scene to scene. So much of beauty is a social construction—smarten up your clothes and do your hair the right way and everyone starts to agree that you are pretty. When the people on screen remark on Anne’s improved looks, we the viewers see it too.

“In Our Midst” in Real Life

As the injustices pile up, and reserves run low, the question of where we should focus our moral attention becomes critical — when exposed to more evils than we can possibly attend to, most of us feel helpless. And what, more than helplessness, excuses apathy and inaction? Rather than confront global suffering, we may cull our feeds, or stop watching the news. Or, worse, we may make of the suffering other an enemy, turning apathy to antipathy. These unspoken algorithms by which we manage our empathy — they are almost innocent, almost “self-care.” (We’re not committing atrocities, just refusing to witness them.) But layered together, they have the shade of evil.

“Picture Yourself Happy” in Real Life

Photos confirm that we were really there, but more so (or less?), they confirm that we were: Being took place. In On Photography, Susan Sontag writes that a portrait, in the days before photography, was meant to confer and confirm status, thus the owner needed only one. With photographic portraits it’s different: “What the photographic record confirms is, more modestly, simply that the subject exists; therefore, one can never have too many.” Photos extend our existence, since they can live on after our deaths like poems or mummy masks. Of course we take selfies, when the barrier to create them is so low. But we don’t just paint self-portraits or take selfies to prove to others we exist. Seeing a photo of myself reinforces my sometimes shaky belief that I exist. Is my existence as it seems? Am I a Boltzmann brain, a character in a simulation, a two-dimensional hologram? Even taking for granted that I’m real and of my time and that other people also exist, do people see me and think of me as I think of myself?

“The Little Room, or the Unreality of Memory” in Pacific Standard

I could not remember the room at all until my mother said it was where the placemats were stored. Then I had a flash of going in there as a child, pulling out the drawer that held the table linens, so I could set the table for some family dinner. I saw myself there in the little room, not from the first person, but as though watching a girl from a kind of bird’s eye view or hidden camera, out somewhere near the ceiling in the den. Yes, finally, I could picture the blond color of the wood and the way the drawer would often stick. But the memory was flimsy, like a memory of a dream. My father still could not picture the room; perhaps he had never been in there. What do you imagine on that wall? my mother asked. Just wall, we both said, a continuation of the wallpaper. I had no fond memories of that room, and in all my years of visiting the museum of my grandmother’s house since it sold, had never seen it there; my mind simply wallpapered over it. And now I doubt the specificity of the rest of my museum — am I sure where the floor lamp was, of the color of the brocade?

“Earth Is Not Vengeful, Just Indifferent” in Pacific Standard

Like an asteroid impact, a supervolcano can cause global cooling, forming an ash cloud that blocks the sun and leads to widespread famine. At this moment in history, when we’re breaking new heat records every month and the permafrost is melting, global cooling doesn’t sound so bad. But we don’t know what the baseline will be when it happens. What if some other disaster has already altered the global climate? A “mini ice age” in the 1300s has been tied to both volcanic and earthquake activity in Europe and the bubonic plague — there is debate over whether famine led to weakened immune systems, making populations more vulnerable to the plague, or whether mass deaths from the plague led to reforestation and subsequent global cooling.

“NASA’s Overlooked Duty to Look Inward” in the New Yorker

Mike Massimino, in his memoir, “Spaceman,” reports having spent almost a full day staring out a window of the Space Shuttle Columbia, watching sunrises and lightning storms (“like a form of communication, like a sequence, like the clouds are alien creatures speaking to each other in code”). On his second spacewalk, Massimino told me recently, he had a spare moment to “take in the view.” He recalls being struck not only by Earth’s incredible beauty—“We are living in a paradise”—but also by its fragility. From out there, he said, especially during night passes, “you can see the thinness of the atmosphere,” a bluish-green line. This sudden perception of Earth as a delicate, intricate system is so common among astronauts that the writer Frank White coined a term for it: the overview effect.

“Magnificent Desolation” in Real Life

When I think of the jumpers, I think of two things. I think of images of women covering their mouths — a pure expression of horror. They were caught on film, watching the towers from the streets of Manhattan. I do this sometimes — hand up, mouth open — when I see or read something horrible, even when alone. What is it for? I think, too, of the documentary about Philippe Petit, who tightrope-walked between the tops of the towers in 1974. At the time they were the second tallest buildings in the world, having just been surpassed by the Sears Tower in Chicago. It was an exceptionally windy day (it is always windy at 1,300 feet) and when a policeman threatened him from the roof of one building, Petit danced and pranced along the rope, to taunt him. This still seems to me like the most unthinkable thing a man has ever willingly done. The jumpers did what he did, but worse. Death was not a risk but a certainty; they jumped without thinking. It’s more horrible to contemplate than many of the other deaths because we know the jumpers were tortured. Death is fathomable, but not torture.

“Vanity Project” in Real Life

On the other hand, there are phantom limbs. Amputees frequently continue to feel the presence of their missing limb and even feel pain in it, suggesting that the mental self-model can be so persistent and strongly ingrained that changes to the physical body are difficult to incorporate into a new mental model — that the mind is not as plastic as the body. Or perhaps it’s that the sense of self expands more readily than it retracts, that the mind is resistant to reducing the scope of the self. I am reminded of the poet Anne Boyer remarking on Twitter that she did not identify with recent photos of herself because her hair was missing, following treatment for breast cancer. Of course, I thought: phantom hair.

“Can Ideas Withstand Shifts in Language?” in Guernica

For every translator, there must come a moment of reckoning, of wondering, What precisely am I translating? Flaubert was famously a stylist, who believed “a good sentence in prose should be like a good line in poetry, unchangeable.” (If unchangeable, then untranslatable.) Odd, then, Davis writes, that “many of the translations do not try to reproduce that style, but simply tell this engrossing story in their own preferred manner.” She cites the “lush, loquacious” 1948 translation by Gerard Hopkins (nephew of the poet), which “added material in almost every sentence.” A text is only made of language, and yet the language seems to generate some other, ineffable, epiphenomenal essence—a spectral text that survives when all the language changes. Infinite translations, infinite texts.

“Personal Data: Notes on Keeping a Notebook” in Catapult

A few weeks ago, cleaning out my grandmother’s room, my mother and I found a plastic bag of personal effects, brittle and delicate, that had belonged to her father, my grandmother’s first husband, who died in 1956. My mother was six at the time and barely remembers him. A black wallet, containing cards and photos (one of my uncle, her older brother, but none of her). Some old receipts and documents, folded and worn soft. A flat, round object we eventually identified as a bottle opener, rusted shut. What meaning was there? He’s part of my blood, but I don’t think of him as related to me. My mother had never seen any of these things.

“Variations on Crying” in The Butter

I have noticed that there’s something about speech that can trigger tears. I’ll hear a story, and know intellectually that the story is sad, but I won’t actually cry until I tell it to someone else. Is it the speech act itself, or the presence of an audience? In college, I learned that a girl from my high school, someone I knew but hadn’t kept in touch with, had been in a bad car accident; her right arm was severed off. I was shocked when I heard it, but not sad, exactly. Later, I repeated the story to my mother; I remember we were driving at the time, and I was in the passenger seat, as the girl would have been. I started crying when I said the word “severed,” which had not seemed quite so brutal in my head as it did it my mouth. It’s not often we have cause to say the word “severed.” Several years ago, my friend Kevin’s wife Katie was almost crushed when a gallery wall fell on top of her; her pelvis was shattered. She has said she didn’t recognize the animal scream that came out of her. When Kevin called their families to tell them what had happened, he couldn’t get it out; he’d try to speak and start sobbing. More than once, mentioning this story offhand to someone else, I’ve gotten unexpectedly choked up, like I can only realize how close she came to being killed or paralyzed when I’m vocalizing it.

“Dream Logic” in The Butter

Years ago, a friend told me that she dreams in the third person, watching herself. At the time, I found this improbable—why wouldn’t you dream as you live?—until I noticed that I often fantasize in the third person. I don’t just mean sexual fantasies, but any time I project forward into an imagined future, and sometimes I replay memories as though I’m watching them from outside the scene. In dreams, though, I embody my body, only seeing myself when I look in the mirror, in which case my reflection is often grotesque or distorted in some way. I once heard that you shouldn’t look in the mirror while on LSD; perhaps the same is true of dreams.