Essays
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Nemo
“You must understand what I cannot make you understand,” Raymond McDaniel writes about Micronauts, the 1970s action figures: “I used these toys in the same way I used reading itself: to be the other that was actually the self.” This essay’s observations—on humanity, selfhood, autonomy, and vision—are a delight to behold.
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“Everything only connected by ‘and’ and ‘and’”: On Elizabeth Bishop and Disappointment
In prose that’s erudite and accessible, former Editor-in-Chief of At Length, Jonathan Farmer, explores why “[s]o many of Elizabeth Bishop’s poems end with something audibly, willfully unsatisfying.” Covering Bishop’s career from “The Map” (1946) to her late elegy for Robert Lowell, “North Haven” (1977), Farmer’s claim will send you back to Bishop’s poems with new eyes.
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Poetry Ha Ha
“Theories of comedy are no more comic in themselves than theories of sexuality are sexy.” Robert Archambeau digs into ideas of comedy and the poetry of Aaron Belz.