Pursuing the effect of Gerard Manley Hopkins’s “He heightens worth who guardedly diminishes,” Charles Wright’s early lyrics are taut, controlled, and highly compressed. Although their diction is neither unnatural nor stilted, the poems are...
Francis Crick winged into the Eagle, a pub popular with researchers at Cambridge University’s nearby Cavendish Laboratory, boasting to one and all, “We have found the secret of life.” It was early in 1953, and the “we” referred to thirty...
Two pairs of shoes still in their boxes: a pair of clean new Hongmahwang loafers and a pair of gilded, tacky Italian slippers. The footwear of a madman caught last December hiding in a rat-filled hole almost within sight of one of his many...
Cursing, I slam down the receiver and run out of the house, shout for Bro. He stands by his car still parked on the street. Arms folded, he turns to me, a stocky young man with black hair and a heavy mustache. He wears a leather jacket and...
What redeems literary anthologists, if we’re able to claim neither the creativity of the poet nor the analytic rigor of the cultural theorist? Having dedicated myself for years to constructing elaborate critical arguments, how did I get...
