The roles assigned to mother and son in Seth Michelson's Fragments trouble me. He gives us a saintly son who clings to his mother's legs "even when kicked and cursed and kicked . . . knowing only to forgive" and a terribly violent mother who screams to a degree unwarranted by the child's (probably) accidental dropping of a gravy boat and then kicks him when she is really raging against something else, some idea of mortality and Malthusian evolution that the poet evokes (not

Despite great differences in our poetic styles, I strongly identify with Barbara Crooker’s conclusion at the end of her thoughts on poetry as therapy presented on the Crab Creek Review blog as part of their Writer’s Notebook series:

In Guernica, Robert Thomas’s visceral poem Plague presents a series of changes that portray the progress of destruction as a reversal of time. The girl who first catches the plague shows it with a sun that seems to age in reverse—from a white-haired tonsured

In the New York Times Sunday Book Review, Steven Millhauser presents a defense of the short story's worth and ambition that unfortunately illustrates one of the most common pitfalls of defending an underappreciated art form: doing so at the expense of another. From a purely practical point of view, this might be excusable

The artist-craftsperson side of me is intrigued by the line breaks in the first of Maurice Scully's three "dances" in The Fifteen Project's current issue. One of the more basic pieces of advice given to poets is to make the final word of a line count; experienced workshoppers who find