What do you do—as a critic—when you encounter a writer so gladdeningly cajoling, so sweetly weird that you’re convinced anyone who read him deeply and carefully would be delighted; but who also, stylistically, can be studiously bizarre in a way …
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We were in the last year of college. My younger brother was in the first year. All my free time went in going around the bazaar. It had become a habit. I quite enjoyed it. In college, in the evening, …
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When the sun goes down you move
horizontal you become everything
in the world at once rather than waking
like vertical where you obsess over
ascend or descend or whatever rain
at the edge of the building spit forth
From a talk presented at the Library of Congress on 3 August 2019, as part of the Asian American Literature Festival
“An intimate lecture.” That was how Lawrence-Minh Davis, one of the intrepid, visionary curators of this festival, …
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As a child I wanted to know why God put me in this body that repelled so many people on sight. Why people felt at liberty to pick me apart and wipe off …
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In the water, the rocks were a dozen colors, ochre to a bruised orange, purple to brick, dusky green to leaden blue, moss-tinged yellows—and all these eclipsed with flashes of sky ricocheting off the surface. These boulders and stones were …
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I began to see, however dimly, that one of my ambitions, perhaps my governing ambition, was to belong fully to this place, to belong as the thrushes and the herons and the muskrats belonged, to be altogether at home here.
Fourteen doctors puzzled over my symptoms before a fifteenth finally presented the results of an eight-hundred-dollar allergy test explaining my seven years of debilitating digestive issues. I stopped eating everything on the list—basil, oranges, raspberries, artichokes, asparagus, mustard, melon, oregano, …
Read MoreWe found the elk’s carcass in the morning, just downhill from the pasture fence where she lay sprawled across an iced-over stream. Carcass is a harsh word for that once-graceful animal, a cow elk whose small head and hooves made …
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