It has now, in 2025, been almost twenty years since the publication of The Year of Magical Thinking, writer Joan Didion’s prickly, spare nonfiction account of her husband’s unexpected death during New Year’s week in 2003. It arrived in the mail on a day I was home sick from work, and I lay in bed with my head pounding and read the whole thing within hours. The post Daughters of Joan appeared first on Slant Books.| Slant Books
It’s a dark poem; that’s for sure. Yet throughout, the poetry itself lessens the darkness. That recurring “have it,” the regular meter, the rhymings throughout (especially that “spaces”/“race is”), the alliterations, —these (to my mind) lighten the gloom. The poem is at once playful and deeply unsettling. Frost, in his mastery, truly has it both ways. The post Robert Frost’s “Desert Places” appeared first on Slant Books.| Slant Books
On the front cover, against a mostly red background, was the white image of a seamed baseball, with the words “The Babe Ruth Story” inscribed on it. In a black box underneath it: “By Babe Ruth as Told to Bob Considine.” To the left, in vertical layout, were four small black and white photographs, showing in sequence the Babe’s mighty swing. The post Close Reading: My Story, continued appeared first on Slant Books.| Slant Books
In the poem “Exile for the Sake of Redemption,” Yehoshua November dares to bring the Divine down to earth. This suggests that it is up to us as it is to God to “engage in activities that we imagine will enrich our future.” Teaching and learning are two of those activities. Poetry—writing and reading it—is another.| Slant Books
If you polled every last person in the world, I’m sure you’d find that, at one point or another, they've written a poem. Not the Haiku assigned in third grade. I’m thinking of the visceral thing composed on the edge of love. Maybe it’s never written down but goes on shaking about, caged in a dusty corner of the mind. The post You Will be Wounded appeared first on Slant Books.| Slant Books
Utilitarian reading (AI) considers words as symbols referring only to other symbols like them. Words are therefore interchangeable, fungible—place holders for each other. AI obligingly sorts the symbols so as to condense and summarize them. By contrast, close reading offers not an answer but a presence. Words are not fungible tokens but embodiments of a speaker’s voice. In utilitarian reading we SEE the words. In close reading we HEAR them, and behind those spoken words someone speaking t...| Slant Books
On the Poetry Foundation’s website page for Pattiann Rogers, we read that “She is noted for her ability to link the natural and scientific worlds in works filled with sensual imagery, spirituality, and a sense of awe.” And also that her books from 2004 through 2017 “continue to explore theological possibilities as revealed through the natural world.” Today, I want to follow this theme in a single volume: Generations (2004). The post Pattiann Rogers’s Poems of Spirituality in Natur...| Slant Books
In this post, I’d like to share with you the story of my career as a close reader. I wonder whether your experience is anything like it. I wonder, too, whether this kind of career is possible today, in an era dominated by social media and full of suspicion and doubt about the value of the humanities. The post Becoming a Close Reader appeared first on Slant Books.| Slant Books
I’m rereading Paradise, Victoria Redel’s most recent collection of poems. Beginning with some midrashic poems, retellings of the story of the Garden of Eden, the book moves on to poems about family, childhood, adolescence, parenting, desire, aging, memory, menstruation, and more. Poems that, at a glance, don’t appear to have anything to do with paradise and the loss of paradise. Yet, on a fourth and fifth reading, I see how deeply connected some of the common experiences of, say, aging,...| Slant Books
My question throughout my reading of these three very different treatments of Hitler, has been: What theme—if any—unifies them, beyond the scandal of their subject? I suggest that that theme has to do with each work’s willingness to picture Hitler dramatically, as a figure of tragedy. The post Turning Hitler into Art? Part Two appeared first on Slant Books.| Slant Books
Cervantes played with the tradition of chivalric romances, just as Shakespeare echoed (on at least one occasion, in Hamlet, mockingly) the Latin plays of Seneca. These authors reveal a paradoxical pattern in literature so consistent as to approach the status of a law: We go forward by looking back. The new literary experience is founded in literary memory. The post The Forest Fires of Amnesia appeared first on Slant Books.| Slant Books
I’ve become slightly obsessed with a writer named Alexander Trocchi. Trocchi was a Scottish writer born in Glasgow in 1925. He probably should have died of a heroin overdose, since he was addicted to the drug for much of his life and lived as an addict on the streets of NYC for many years. Alas, he died of cancer in London in 1984. The gods are, as ever, cruel and mischievous. The dedicated smack addict perished from smoking too many cigarettes.| Slant Books
In his interview with Slant Books about his new poetry collection, titled Vanishments, Eric Pankey says: “In my poems, I tend to be drawn to moments where things that we perceive are just on the verge of perceptibility—a presence leaning toward absence, an absence coalescing into perhaps a presence. The poem, as an artform made of words, becomes the embodiment and articulation of that in-betweenness, instability, disequilibrium, imbalance.” The post Vanishments in Eric Pankey’s New Po...| Slant Books
“I have never started a poem whose end I knew,” Robert Frost said, because “writing a poem is discovering.” But how do writers know when they’ve discovered the end? How do we know when a piece of writing is done, is the way we want it, the way it must be? Perhaps that’s why the Internet teems with advice for poets seeking counsel and support for dealing with this problem. I recall a thread that had the caption, “How the hell do I end a poem?” The post Beginning and Ending: Lou...| Slant Books
In my poems, I tend to be drawn to moments where things that we perceive are just on the verge of perceptibility—a presence leaning toward absence, an absence coalescing into perhaps a presence. The poem, as an artform made of words, becomes the embodiment and articulation of that in-betweenness, instability, disequilibrium, imbalance. With a bit of language, I attempt to give shape to the ineffable, that which is beyond words.| Slant Books
: W. D. Snodgrass’s master poetic work, The Fuehrer Bunker: The Complete Cycle, was years in the making. Finally published in 1995, the work reflects his care in adjusting not only the tone but the shape of each character’s poetic speech to model his or her personal character. Speer’s stately, self-serving monologues are presented as a sequence of triangles (reflecting Speer the builder). Himmler’s dry monologues are divided into individual letters imprisoned in graph paper grids. And...| Slant Books
Lawrence’s “The Migration Series” is painted with Casein tempera, a paint derived from milk protein. HeLevi’s poems are composed of air from the lungs, the vibration of the vocal cords, and the shaping of sounds with the mouth and throat. The voice was translated into visual form, alphabetic writing, and was initially preserved in iron gall ink written on parchment or vellum. This poem, these paintings: wonders. The might of human imagination and artistry. The post Where I Find You ap...| Slant Books
Othello’s love for Desdemona is intense and exhilarating to him, but it’s fragile, for it has come at a cost. This warrior, an older man, different in race and background, celebrates his passion for his beloved even as he wonders whether the sacrifice of his freedom was worth it. Has he given up too much, lost more than he gained? That’s Othello’s fear, the vulnerability Iago exploits. The post Close reading Shakespeare: Othello Speaks appeared first on Slant Books.| Slant Books
Fr. Murray Bodo is now in his eighties, but in this new collection his creative mind is as rich and fertile as ever—as it ranges over such subjects as favorite museums; Easter, Christmas, and other seasons; his New Mexico childhood, his travels, his aging.| Slant Books
In her memoir, called Y2K, Colette Shade accomplishes the feat of critiquing “millennial nostalgia,” beginning by reenacting the frenzied eagerness that prompted it. She stacks up like houses of cards the accumulations of places, people, products, and promotions that once entranced her, and then undercuts them, so that they flutter to the floor, wilted and weightless.| Slant Books
