There is a famous story amongst Assyriologists. It concerns a man named George Smith, who was working at the British Museum in the mid-nineteenth century but who was by no means someone you’d expect to be working at the British Museum and studying and deciphering cuneiform tablets since he was, in fact, born in working class circumstances in London in 1840, and managed, somehow, to teach himself to read Akkadian and Sumerian, which anyone who has ever looked at a cuneiform tablet will reali...| Slant Books
Sometimes illumination comes to us from a single word. This recently happened to me when I was reading the Gospel of Luke and encountered this verse from the Passion narrative, about Pilate, Barabbas, and Jesus: “And he released unto them him that for sedition and murder was cast into prison, whom they had desired; but he delivered Jesus to their will.” (KJV 23:25) It’s the deadly precision of “will” that makes the sentence disturbing. The post Close Reading the Gospel of Luke—wit...| Slant Books
Norman Fischer is an influential American Zen-Buddhist, a poet and writer, and a Jew. He wrote Opening to You: Zen-Inspired Translations of the Psalms after spending a week with the Trappist monks at Gethsemani Abbey, where he experienced for the first time the Christian monastic practice of daily recitation of the psalms. Troubled by “the violence, passion, and bitterness” expressed in some of the psalms but recognizing the power they held for the monks, Fischer decided to investigate th...| Slant Books
Virginity is on trial here, and virginity’s crime is…? Tolentino summarizes one writer’s terms for it: “that celibacy had lately doubled among people in their early twenties.” As if virginity is metastasizing like cancer or multiplying like rabbits. Then Tolentino quotes another writer who gives the offense an economic spin by calling it a “sex recession,” as if virginity were the fall-out from bad investments. The post How I Became a Fan of Jia Tolentino appeared first on Slant...| Slant Books
When my neighbor, composer David Liptak, was visiting earlier in the summer. I asked what he was currently composing, and he said, “I’ve set two poems by Marianne Moore: ‘The Fish’ and ‘A Jelly-Fish.’” I wasn’t familiar with Moore’s poems, so I immediately got from the library Becoming Marianne More: The Early Poems, 1907-1924, and turned to David’s two poems. The post Marianne Moore’s Wavy Poem appeared first on Slant Books.| Slant Books
Like the other two books in your trilogy, The Grand Valley focuses on a single work of art—in this case, it’s fair to say, on a series of paintings. The artist is Joan Mitchell, who many people may not have heard of. Can you give us a “teaser” for the book—why is this artist worth paying attention to?| Slant Books
Do you know Wallace Stevens’s poem, with its strange title, “A Postcard from the Volcano”? It’s included in Ideas of Order, published first in a limited edition in July 1935 and then in a trade edition in October 1936. I reread it recently, and I was spellbound by its first stanza, macabre and sweet, the beginning of a story about memory and imagination. The post Where is Wallace Stevens?: Close Reading “A Postcard from the Volcano” appeared first on Slant Books.| Slant Books
It’s no longer the student who’s shocked by the unwelcome demands made on him or her by the first writing assignment. It’s the teacher who’s shocked, this time by the question of what’s to be done with the result, since it wasn’t the student who wrote the paper, but a computer. But if today’s English teachers are shocked at getting “perfect themes” because AI is writing them, why are they giving assignments for which “perfect themes” are the correct responses?| Slant Books
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
