Category: Poetry

The best books for critical thinking are not always books that announce themselves as critical thinking books. Some do, and there is nothing wrong with that. But attention, judgment, interpretation, humility, and better questioning are often trained more deeply by literature than by instruction alone. A good book can teach you to ask: What am…

Reading culture is not only the culture of books. It is the culture of attention that gathers around books: how people recommend them, misread them, praise them, abandon them, carry them, lend them, quote them, argue with them, and return to them after long silences. For people finding their way back to books, the word…

Book culture can be a lovely thing when it helps a person find their way toward a shelf, a room, a voice, or a stranger who loved the same sentence. It becomes less lovely when it turns reading into a performance of identity. People who are finding their way back to reading do not need…

Spoken poetry is poetry returned to the body. It is the poem as breath, pressure, timing, pause, interruption, melody, stutter, address, and presence. A poem on the page can be beautiful in silence, but hearing a poem aloud reminds us that language was never only ink. It was mouth first. It was memory, chant, spell,…

Most timelines of literary movements have the energy of a hallway outside an exam room. Pleasure arrives, if it arrives at all, after the reader has already been made to feel late. A better way into literary movements begins with pressure. Who was allowed to speak? Which language was considered proper? What kinds of grief,…

What Is an Extended Metaphor? The Direct Definition An extended metaphor is a sustained comparison. A regular metaphor might say that grief is a house. An extended metaphor keeps walking through the rooms. It notices the locked pantry, the hallway where the lightbulb keeps failing, the bedroom nobody enters, the front step where visitors stand…