Garret Keizer is the author of nine books, including the memoir Getting Schooled (Metropolitan, 2014) and the poetry collection The World Pushes Back (Texas Review, 2018). He is a contributing editor to Harper’s and VQR.
My sense of gratitude seems to have grown with time. I feel grateful about as often as I need to pee, which these days is a matter of minutes more than hours.
Our daughter talked early and walked late and was a lover of books even before she could talk. So it is not always easy to reconstruct the chronology of her enthusiasms for the stories we read to her and the make-believe they inspired...
Like other children, I was fascinated by old Lucifer, by his horns and tail, which simultaneously made him sinister and gave him an animal’s grace, by his fire-engine hide, his flame that no fire engine can put out, and above all by his...
Once the fastest-growing city in America and its fourth largest, the cradle of Motown music is now the country’s leader in urban decline. Its population peaked in 1950; since then, it has lost nine of ten manufacturing jobs and 63 percent...
Not long after I fell in love with my wife, I fell in love with her father. I can’t say for sure if I loved him until after she and I were married, but I liked him from that very first night.