‘A Clock stopped’ is not one of Emily Dickinson’s best-known poems, but it uses its central metaphor to explore one of the most salient themes of her poetry: death. Dickinson uses the image of the stopped clock to reflect on the ending of a life and what this means. The clock in the poem is […]
Over the holidays, while traveling out of state to visit family, I left my outsize houseplant collection in the hands of our pet sitter, a wildly talented cat whisperer but a less-than-expert caretaker of calathea. I feared the worst: that I would return to a home full of ex-flora, the floor covered in brown leaves, […]
By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University) ‘The Fly’ is not one of the best-known short stories of the New Zealand-born writer Katherine Mansfield (1888-1923), but it is significant for being one of her few stories which deals directly with the First World War. In the story, a man is reminded of the death of his […]
I like to say my new novel, Underjungle, is a tale of love, loss, family, and war—set entirely underwater. So War and Peace , but three-thousand feet deeper. And considerably shorter. And maybe a little funnier, too. It’s also the story of an intelligent, meditative, and sometimes tempestuous species that discover a human body and […]
Award-winning poet and writer Téa Mutonji is Western’s incoming writer-in-residence. (Sarah Bodri photo) As Western’s incoming writer-in-residence, Téa Mutonji feels right at home, relating to students. The award-winning poet and author is a student herself, currently pursuing her MFA in the low-residency creative writing program at NYU, where she was awarded the 2021 Jill Davis […]
A panoramic illustration shows a young Black girl in a tutu pushing forward out of a pool of her own tears as if doing the breaststroke. Floating on top of the water beneath her are some of the words that have made her cry: “too big,” “cow,” “ha ha,” “moose.” “The first time I looked […]
The following is from xxx’s Lojman . Ojen was born in 1981 to Kurdish parents in Malatya, Turkey. In 2014, Ojen published her striking debut novel, Aşı (Vaccine) , about a state-sponsored vaccine campaign in an imaginary Kurdish village. That same year, Ojen was recognized among the ten most important emerging voices in Turkish literature. […]
By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University) ‘Happiness’ is a poem by the American writer Raymond Carver (1938-88). Carver is probably best-known for his short stories, especially the anthology favourite ‘ What We Talk about When We Talk about Love ’, but he was also a gifted poet, and his poetry helps us to clarify our […]
THE LABOR OF BEING lies at the heart of Sinking Bell , Bojan Louis’s first short-story collection, which made NPR’s list of “Books We Love” from 2022. In the context of genocidal colonialism, forced assimilation, and the cultural erasure of Diné voices, existing at all constitutes an act of strength. While history necessarily marks these […]
Five times in my historical novel Sparrow , the character Calidus, a young provincial Roman who is the oldest son of a brothel owner uses the late twentieth century idiom, “Whatever.” On each occasion one of his free employees is telling him something he doesn’t particularly want to deal with. Twice he waves his hand […]
