Creative nonfiction
PB Daily / “How Jewishness Comes and Goes”
“It’s nice to know that, if I ever needed matzo, someone would offer me some. It’s nice to know that if I ever felt alone in the world, someone would tell me I still belong.”
Slate / Why Super Bowl Ads Don’t Care if You Hate Them
“I want to tell you about a kiss. It happened 10 years ago, but I still can’t forget it. And neither can you.”
Catapult / What To Do When Work Drains Your Creative Drive
“A bitter irony, courtesy of capitalism: writers working as writers to support the writing they were too spent to do.”
68to05 / Guster, Keep It Together
“Guster never took anything seriously, which my 18-year-old self adored about them.”
Catapult / I’m a Nervous Wreck When I Write Prose
“I am a poet writing a novel. Which is to say, I find myself in hell.”
Yale Review / Why Does Every Ad on TV Sound Exactly the Same?
“It’s worth remembering that uncertainty is always a part of our lives—a fact of moving through time, not a measure of it.”
Guernica / Raising the Dead
"We lionize writers who have passed not only in the spirit of eulogizing them, but because often they’re the ones we most fondly remember reading in our youth."
Guernica / Being Jewy
"I wanted to prove that I valued my pride over money. I wanted to prove his stereotypes wrong."
AGNI Online / Is Poetry True or False?
"Who was this drunk I made up, wandering through my poems? And what entitled me to claim him?"
Book reviews
The Rumpus / On Moving Kings by Joshua Cohen
"The central conceit of Moving Kings—that evicting a New Yorker who has failed to make rent can be compared to dispossessing a Palestinian of her home in a military raid—is an intriguing albeit treacherous one."
Fiction Advocate / Eat Only When You're Hungry by Lindsay Hunter
"In a book about binge eating, Hunter is always feeding the reader more metaphors, sometimes handfuls per page."
Fiction Advocate / A First-Generation Kid: Too Much and Not the Mood by Durga Chew-Bose
"Chew-Bose covers a lot of territory in two-hundred pages, meditating on everything from Calcutta to Build-A-Bear, and everyone from Annie Baker to Allen Iverson."
The Rumpus / On Calamities by Renee Gladman
"Reading Gladman, I sometimes feel I'm watching a mastermind manipulate a Rubik's Cube, except the goal isn't to solve it but to present every possible arrangement."
The Rumpus / On The Hatred of Poetry by Ben Lerner
"If you’ve ever taught a literature class, you’ve seen it before: the student seated in the back raises his hand, puffs out his chest and proclaims his distaste for poetry, as if pushing broccoli off his plate..."
Kenyon Review Online / Music in Motion: Nicole Terez Dutton's If One Of Us Should Fall
"Rather than asserting dominance, Dutton’s poetry interrogates it: her poems ask, how do people play each other? 'You are / fingers run across, slide hollow / scraped up the neck, you are / practice.'"
Harvard Review Online / On Black Square by Tadeusz Dąbrowski
"Tadeusz Dąbrowski’s Black Square presents an entrancing geometry of contrasts. Opposites are routinely set against one another in these poems, yielding a landscape of 'churches / next to brothels, graveyards next to solaria.'"
Kenyon Review Online / Elegy Meets Selfie: Contextualizing Sina Queyras's M x T
"Elegy is, among other things, a form of gift-giving: the mourner bestows praise on the departed through the humble offering of a poem. But unlike most gifts, an elegy permits no possibility of reciprocation."
Kenyon Review Online / Spiraling to the Point: Sally Keith's The Fact of the Matter
"Keith’s poetry succeeds in large measure because it admits the complexity of its undertaking. When it comes to mourning, there simply is 'no good math for finding a middle'—the experience is fully disorienting."
Harvard Review Online / On Ceiling of Sticks by Shane Book
"Book crosses boundaries with both urgency and ease, transporting his reader from the arena of the personal to more remote worlds of significance."
Kenyon Review Online / Strength, Sweetness, and More: The Available World by Ander Monson
"Monson’s interest in society’s discards may recall the work of A.R. Ammons, in particular his 1993 masterpiece, Garbage. Like Ammons... Monson arrives at startlingly fertile images by digging through what has been scrapped."