“In a poem, we feel what is there, but also what is not.”
Poems
Posted inEditor's Pick
What My Father’s Death Taught Me about Poetry
Matthew Zapruder examines his relationship with poetry and with his father. Despite being two men with great facility for precise language, they were unable to use it to bridge the distance between them. In likening poems to people, Zapruder posits that the most beautiful thing about the poems most important to him is that their […]
Posted inNonfiction, Quotes
Poems: Protection From Isolation and Solitary Confinement
What we all need now? Poetry, sweet poetry.
Posted inEditor's Pick
My Hundred
Beth Ann Fennelly suggests that to fully embrace the beauty of poetry, one must memorize it. Once committed to memory — a process that gets easier with practice — a poem forever becomes prophylactic against stressful days and lonely times: “We’ve all known solitary confinement. We’ve all inhabited isolation rooms. But the poems we know […]
Posted inEssays & Criticism, Nonfiction, Quotes, Writing
At McSorley’s: Unsorted Regulars, Misfits, Liars, Heroes, and Psychos
Rafe Bartholomew discovers his father’s voice in the very place he thought was holding him back, McSorley’s Old Ale House
Posted inUncategorized
Longreads Member Exclusive: The Anthologist (Excerpt), by Nicholson Baker
This week’s Longreads Member pick is Chapter 1 from Nicholson Baker’s 2009 novel, The Anthologist, published by Simon & Schuster. The excerpt comes recommended by Hilary Armstrong, a literature student at U.C. Santa Barbara and a Longreads intern. She writes: Someone I love once told me that they don’t understand poetry. It’s all random line breaks and rhythms […]
Posted inUncategorized
Longreads Member Exclusive: The Anthologist (Excerpt), by Nicholson Baker
This week’s Longreads Member pick is Chapter 1 from Nicholson Baker’s 2009 novel, The Anthologist, published by Simon & Schuster. The excerpt comes recommended by Hilary Armstrong, a literature student at U.C. Santa Barbara and a Longreads intern. She writes: Someone I love once told me that they don’t understand poetry. It’s all random line breaks and rhythms […]
Posted inUncategorized
Finding Poetry in Illness
A woman recovering from a kidney transplant finds solace in poetry: I began with C.K. Williams’s ‘Dream’ (‘Mad dreams! Mad love!’) and ended with Kyger’s ‘[He is pruning the privet]’: ‘You are not alone is this world / not a lone a parallel world of reflection / in a window keeps the fire burning.’ In […]
Posted inUncategorized
Finding Poetry in Illness
A woman recovering from a kidney transplant finds solace in poetry: I began with C.K. Williams’s ‘Dream’ (‘Mad dreams! Mad love!’) and ended with Kyger’s ‘[He is pruning the privet]’: ‘You are not alone is this world / not a lone a parallel world of reflection / in a window keeps the fire burning.’ In […]