Where I live is about twenty minutes from anywhere else in Los Angeles. What this actually means is that I live ten minutes from anything when there’s no traffic, and forty-five minutes when there is. In reality, there’s no given instance during the day when I actually live twenty minutes from any geographical point in LA, but it’s an easy way to say I live in the middle of town. The area lacks the socioeconomic and demographic cohesion common to most LA neighborhoods, so it’s not particularly cool or uncool, it’s just twenty minutes from places that are. It’s a neighborhood that’s special in the same way a local laundromat is special—you get people from all walks of life.

The building itself is a small, charming holdover from when old Hollywood was just called Hollywood. I park on the street, and I live in one of fourteen modest units, where I am very happy. I’ve lived in old buildings for most of my adult life, and it is my preference to do so. Of course, there are costs associated with living in an old building. You might have an occasional leak or wonky electrical wiring, but these are small problems that can be solved. As with any formative experience, part of the joy in fixing them is the skill gained, or the longevity of the solution. If you fix a leak and you did it right, it’ll take a second for the leak to come back. Once you’ve dealt with something once, it is not such a tragedy the next time. I think that’s what it is to get older: you get softer with age because you’ve experienced a lot of things once, and you’re equipped to do them again if you have to. Remember that first sip of alcohol, or the first cigarette? You turned your back on your innocence, but you didn’t die, so you did it again. However, when a task requires constant maintenance, there is no finish line, so there is no small victory. You never feel done, and it becomes the bane of your existence. The great scourge of my little life, twenty minutes from everywhere else in Los Angeles, is the dust.

LA is a dusty town, and in the century that my building has been around, it has only gathered more of it. The once airtight caulk around the windows has loosened its grip, and the drywall has eroded into Swiss cheese. It doesn’t help that I’m two blocks from an especially busy intersection, and it definitely doesn’t help that I have filled my home with secondhand objects that bring with them their own histories of dust. I clean constantly, with nightly touch-ups and a deep clean that eats up half of an honest weekend. I sweep, Swiffer (dry and wet), and vacuum, but really I am just displacing the dust. As I clean, I kick up more dust, and, betrayed by my own body, I make even more new dust by shedding dead skin cells throughout the process. There is no end in sight, because there is no end to the dust.

I encourage the dust even further by leaving my windows wide open during the day. This is an attempt to cycle out the stale air for fresh air, but who am I kidding? LA is famous for having some of the worst air in the world. But to me it smells good. It smells like everything it has ever touched. It smells like the elements and it smells like argan oil. Sometimes it smells like jasmine, sometimes like wildfires, and, if you try hard enough, it smells like nickels, and the dream of a sweaty handshake from some producer that made moving across the country all worth it, because that handshake is going to change your life. I have knowingly created ideal conditions in which dust thrives, but what’s the point of California if you’re not going to blur the line between indoor and out?

Still, in vain, I clean, because I’m supposed to. I clean because it makes me feel necessary in my own home, and because I come from a long line of people who clean. Even as I clean, on some level I accept defeat. I may be stupid, but I am not dumb. I know I cannot control the dust; it is bigger than me. It was here before me, and it will be here long after I am gone. I am but a guest in a world covered in dust. It’s everywhere—not just in my apartment or at that intersection, or in California but everywhere. Between all the space where there is oxygen, look a little harder—there’s dust. You can’t see it until you do, and what you call it might depend on how long your hair is: dead space, vibes, the ether. Between enemies, it might be called animus; between two lovers, it might be the Fourth of July. But it really isn’t any of that. That which separates your face from mine is just dust. In death, I will become dust, when in reticence I’ll accept that I can’t beat ‘em, so I join ‘em. You, me, and everyone else—we’re all dust that just hasn’t formed yet, but until I am dust, I will continue to move it from one place to the next.

Steak is like sex, is like art: bloody; gets you high; is disgusting if you think about it for too long. And blue steak, then, is like sex work: a carefully crafted artifice that allows for the presentation of something ostensibly raw to the consumer, without the risks of actual raw consumption. The person who orders blue steak feels it as real, and animal, though it is sanitized, and carefully so.

In SoHo, there is a boutique hotel whose rooms are blue. Blue carpet, blue ceiling, blue-patterned sheets. I met a client there several years ago, when I still had short bangs. I wore a vintage skirt-and-top set—black, with colorful flowers—and black lingerie from l’Agent, the now-defunct, less expensive little sister brand to Agent Provocateur. My client wanted our time together to feel like a movie. He didn’t say this, but his behavior made it clear. He booked me for only an hour but wanted an experiential arc: he sat me first in the small living room area of his suite, presenting liquor he had put on ice for me. Music played softly through the room’s sound system: “Nothing’s Gonna Hurt You Baby” by Cigarettes After Sex, a song that I’d only ever heard as the background of a bad television show. He moved me into the bedroom, bantering, as though he had to charm me. I have absolutely no recollection of what he looked like or what his name was. This isn’t because I was seeing so many clients I couldn’t keep track, but because it’s useless information to retain after the fact. I remember how he behaved—the only salient thing—which was annoying, and also standard, fine. I overstayed our appointment because the sex refused to end, as happens often with older men who want to paw at a young woman but don’t quite care whether or not they finish, and certainly not in the allotted time. “Nothing’s Gonna Hurt You Baby” returned to the playlist; it was looping, as was the experience.

I played the song for myself after, alone in my own room. A user called “i’m cyborg but that’s ok” had uploaded it to YouTube along with a compilation of scenes from Lost in Translation, a movie I’d never seen but that I knew was about a relationship between a washed-up older man having a midlife crisis and a beautiful young woman. The video compilation looked like an escort advertisement: in the opening scene, Scarlett Johansson sits in a hotel room window wearing only a large men’s shirt—blue—looking down at the wide expanse of Tokyo beneath her; in the next scene, she dives into an enormous, empty hotel pool, at night—the pool and the surrounding windowpanes all blue, too. The images spoke of money and alienation. The song captured the affect of a certain type of client: slightly flat; grasping toward a Daddy-esque certainty but falling short; single-mindedly offering reassurance, but of what he hardly seemed to know. I grew oddly attached to the song and to cyborg’s music video for a period. I would watch it on my way to work, flattening my own affect, compacting myself into a version of a girl aligned with the lyrics:

Whispered something in your ear
It was a perverted thing to say
But I said it anyway
Made you smile and look away
Nothing’s gonna hurt you, baby.

“Saint who?” I asked. “Eh-meh-ren-tsya,” Olga Tokarczuk repeated. Saint Anne’s mother. I was nonplussed. The mother of the mother of the Virgin Mary? Tokarczuk blew out cigarette smoke at high speed, then inhaled with excitement and impatience. I needed a lesson.

We were midway through a nine-hour-long exchange about her life and writing, the edited version of which you can read in the Review’s Spring issue. Throughout our conversation, I often felt that, like her books, Tokarczuk’s speech requires footnotes and annotations.

Tokarczuk researches her short stories and novels with academic intensity. She digs up forgotten, esoteric myths and legends and shows how this esoterica is woven into the warp and woof of European culture. Beneath a Europe of rational, religious, racial, and ethnic dogmatisms, she unveils a continent  rife with ethnically and linguistically syncretic visionaries, mystics, and half-pagan storytellers. There is a hopefulness to these counterhistories that puts its faith in humanity’s capacity for creativity and imagination—in the loosening and intermingling of top-down stereotypes and norms by collective acts of retelling and elaboration. Emerentia, Tokarczuk explained to me, was one such esoteric discovery that she wove into her latest novel, Empuzjon, which has yet to appear in English.

I was raised a devout Catholic, and in my early teens I kept a book of saints by my bedside, arranged in the pages from January to December following the order of their feast days. Each evening, I would read the day’s entry before going to bed, committing the saints’ names to memory. Saint Scholastica, after whom the family elders named one of my great-aunts, was Saint Benedict’s sister. Saint Perpetua, the ancient Roman martyr tortured by Septimus Severus’s henchmen in the Colosseum; Saint Audifax, a Persian protector of early Christian converts about whom so little is known that he was taken off the official roster of holy days shortly after the publication of my hagiographic compendium. And yet I’d never heard of the saint who Poles call Emerencja, and English speakers Emerentia—a figure as important as the great-grandmother of Jesus himself.

I had recently begun attending Sarah Lawrence College when Anzia Yezierska’s novel Bread Givers was first introduced to me. I was twenty years old, but as a married Orthodox Jewish woman with a one-year-old child to show for myself instead of a high school diploma, I had been enrolled in the continuing education program for one year in order to prepare for proper matriculation. The blunt hairline of my voluminous wig paired with my over-the-knee skirts would have been enough to render me the exotic outsider to my worldly classmates even if I hadn’t revealed my heavy accent or my ignorance of basic cultural references. So when an older classmate who hadn’t previously made much effort at conversing with me thrust the worn paperback into my hands, I was caught unawares by her sudden attention.

“Maybe you’ve already read it, but I thought, just in case …”

Eyeing the title and the unfamiliar name of the author, I shook my head in bemusement. “Is this some famous classic,” I asked, “some essential part of the canon I’ve missed and need to catch up on?”

She laughed. “Not really,” she answered. “But back when I was in college the first time around, some acquaintances of mine were instrumental in its republication, so that’s how I know about it. I came across it again recently while I was spring cleaning, but you know how it is with coincidences. They rarely are. I thought of you immediately; I felt strongly that this book was meant for you.”

When book banning started to heat up two years ago, many wondered how long until a library worker would be seriously hurt over defending the right to read. Now, we know it’s not going to be long at all.

Over the last month, several libraries have faced bomb and shooting threats as a direct result of the books housed in their collections. Books that were reviewed by professionals and deemed appropriate for those school and public libraries. Books that, of course, feature queer and/or BIPOC writers and characters who do not align with the views of those who believe that dialing in murder threats is an appropriate way to handle those who do not follow their radical right-wing Christian nationalist agenda.

Shove your thoughts and prayers. You need to show up and have your voice heard. This is unacceptable, it’s abhorrent, and it is going to end in bloodshed.

Which is exactly what the bigots want. They see this as their holy war and they themselves joyful warriors.

Analog horror books are a riff off of the ever-popular found footage sub-genre of horror that came to popularity in the late 2000s notably on YouTube. The sub-genre is often full of grainy, “dated” looking footage, mysterious circumstances, and in the style of analog electronics like television, VHS tapes, FM radio, etc. Viewers are presented with fake news reports or “documentary” style videos that start seemingly normal and then delve into depicting things like alien invasions, cryptid sightings, or all kinds of mysterious happenings after being taken over or corrupted by someone or something. Often, there are few to no characters at all, instead you as the viewer are the witness to whatever is happening to the hijacked footage on screen.

Some big examples on the YouTube scene are “Local 58” which is a series depicting a TV station that’s “taken over” numerous times over the years, “Gemini Home Entertainment” with its VHS tapes showing aliens attempting to take over the Earth, and “The Mandela Catalogue“ which is a Wisconsin-based doppelganger horror story set in the ’90s.

Since this is such a visual medium, I got to wondering if there were any analog horror books out there that captured a similar type of horror. Here are eight I was able to find that fit at least some aspect of the analog horror genre if you’re in the market for a literary version!

If you spend a good amount of time in manga circles, you may have heard the term dōjinshi before. And you may have certain assumptions about what it is, which I fear is quite common, particularly for those in the west. But for those who’ve ever been curious about dōjinshi and want to learn more about the medium, here is a quick and easy guide to what it actually is, where to find it, and even a few recommendations!

It is a common misconception that dōjinshi is equivalent to (mostly erotic) fan fiction. And while there are many dōjinshi that do fall into this category — especially given the fact that self-publishing means there are no restrictions from publishers on content — it is certainly not all that dōjinshi is. Alongside all the dōjinshi that is based upon existing characters and stories (this category of dōjinshi is also known as aniparo), dōjinshi also includes plenty of completely original work. It is also important to note that dōjinshi is not exclusively created by amateur creators. Many professional mangaka got their start in dōjinshi, and some even continue to participate in the practice in addition to their official projects.

It first emerged as early as the Meiji period, in the 1870s and 1880s. Often created and distributed within small groups, it reached a peak during the prewar years of the Shōwa period as a popular vehicle for creative expression among young people. Though the prevalence of this category has experienced various rises and falls throughout its history, it has grown increasingly popular since approximately the 1980s when aniparo became a more predominant part of the market, and with the founding of Comiket — an event dedicated specifically to dōjinshi and now the largest comic convention in the world — in 1975. Today, with the rise of technology and ease with which creators are able to not only create, but also promote and distribute their own work, dōjinshi has expanded even more significantly.

If you’ve been on the bookish side of the internet for long enough, you’ve most likely come across the sub-genre Dark Academia. Popular as both a literary sub-genre and fashion aesthetic, Dark Academia has inspired other “academias” including the seasonally appropriate Light Academia. As a newly emerging sub-genre, Light Academia is finding its style. Let’s breakdown what we do know of Light Academia and the differences between Light and Dark Academia.

The student characters of Light Academia may be intelligent, but not driven by hubris, greed, or vengeance. Learning, for the Light Academic, is a pleasure and education is a prize. The stuffy, oft Eurocentric Dark Academia catalogue is swapped for visual arts, music, and world literature. Visually and thematically, Light and Dark academia lie on opposite sides of the spectrum. While Dark Academia focuses on bleak literary themes of oppression, death, and existentialism, light academia focuses on themes of friendship, resourcefulness, joy, and the beauty of life.

The aesthetic of Light Academia is nearly identical to Dark Academia, with only the brightness turned up. Think light, earth toned shades. Tweeds and ties, fluffy white dresses and ribbons, vintage knits, classical statues, bouquets of wild flowers, and stacks of worn leather books. Imagery of coziness and domesticity feature heavily in these books — a squashy couch with sleeping kittens, freshly baked bread, paint splatters, and floral tea cups. Now that we’ve covered the basics, here’s a few Light Academia books to get your bookshelf started.

We need better ways to describe romance novels — particularly in terms of sexual content. In terms of genres, sub-genres, and tropes, I think we’re set. Of course, there is sometimes some overlap or cross-genre mingling. But in general, if I pick up an enemies-to-lovers contemporary romance or a marriage of convenience historical romance, I know what I’m getting. However when it comes to romance novel descriptions that communicate how sexually explicit a romance novel is, I pretty much hate every term available. I dislike them on a gut level. But I also find most of these terms pretty confusing.

And I don’t think I’m alone. I constantly see romance readers upset because a book they read had more sex than they wanted or not as much sex as they wanted. And a lot of times, both sides can blame the book or the author instead of our inability to correctly categorize and communicate about romance novels. I think this is what’s also behind the frustration some readers have of the dominance of illustrated covers (although that’s another story for another article). Readers want to know what kind of book they have before they start reading and don’t want to feel tricked.

Categorizing books based on sexual content isn’t as simple as separating genres or tropes. Gatekeepers and readers alike often rate queer romances or romances by authors of color as more sexually explicit than books featuring comparable writing by straight, white romance authors. So finding a universal rating system we can all agree on would both be impossible and potentially harmful. But even though I have read (and enjoyed!) romances ranging from a librarian romance with no sex to a monster romance with a dragon man who has more than one penis…I think it’s fair to want to know what end of the spectrum your next read is going to be on. And I personally cringe when I see romance novels described as hot or sweet or dirty. Let’s break down some of the problems with these terms.

Are you ready to add a whole lot of excellent nonfiction to your spring TBR? I hope so, because there is so much of it coming out in the next few weeks. There was a time, years ago, when I didn’t read nonfiction, and while I am grateful every day that this is no longer the case, I am also overwhelmed by the sheer number of nonfiction books on my TBR. If you have the same problem, I am very sorry to tell you that I am not here to help you with it. I am here to make it worse (better).

These April releases are especially rich in genre-expanding nonfiction, but there are also plenty of memoirs and some fantastic history books if that is what you love! You’ll find two brilliant Asian American memoirs that tackle American history and contemporary life through intimate family stories. I’ve got a fantastic memoir about drag for you that features art and photographs alongside the writing! And if that kind of hybrid book is your jam, I’ve got another treat in store: a collection of writing about trees and the natural world featuring illustrations that will take your breath away. I’ve also highlighted some new books by some of today’s most brilliant scholars and poets, including Christina Sharpe and Maggie Smith.

Ready? I promise it’s okay to just preorder and/or place library holds for the entire list.

Happy April, bookish friends! April may bring showers and cold blustery days, but it is also bringing us some amazing new YA releases that are making me think of SUMMER. This month’s round up includes some summery reads that are jumping straight to my summer reading list, along with some big name releases, new series, exciting anthologies, and some promising sophomore novels. Whether you’re game for a summer romcom, a high fantasy novel, or something queer, April has got you covered!

As always, I couldn’t possibly begin to cover all of the great new YA books hitting shelves this month, so this is just a choice selection of what you will find. For this month’s round up, I didn’t include some books that I figured were already on your radar — the new Alexandra Bracken novel Silver in the Bone, for example, as well as the new Wibbroka book, Never Vacation With Your Ex. You’ll also want to make sure you don’t miss the latest installment in Charlie Jane Anders’s Unstoppable series, Promises Stronger Than Darkness. But the rest of these books are going to be amazing, so open up your wishlist and library accounts and get ready explode your TBR!

It has been more than ten years since I wrote these words for this magazine’s website: “At last I had begun writing my long-planned book about Captain Ahab’s doomed enterprise in Moby-Dick—about Robur’s doomed enterprise in Verne’s Maître du Monde—about the doomed enterprise of Doctor Hans Reinhardt from the 1979 science-fiction film The Black Hole.”

And now maybe we can approach the same topic from a different angle, as the contortionist said on prom night. Refuse to accept that it is your fate to refuse to accept your fate. The only way not to be driven insane by it is to be insane from the outset.

The Black Hole, 1979. It amazes me that a group of people could make a movie about being afraid of a hole, being attracted to a hole, feeling excited and curious about going into a hole, feeling concerned that, while on the one hand it might not be such a good idea to go into the hole, on the other hand maybe all the best things in life will become possible only after you have gone into the hole, and so on. It’s not the feelings that amaze me; I feel them all myself. It’s the idea that $20 million and a crew of more than a hundred crew members should have been devoted to dramatizing, over ninety minutes, an idea that any healthy child could express in a single simple sentence. Go ahead, smart guy, write that sentence.

Briefly: The USS Palomino, in deep space, approaches a black hole into which a nearby and apparently derelict ship, the Cygnus, mysteriously does not fall. While the crew is examining this ghost ship, the Palomino incurs structural damage and is about to be drawn into the black hole itself when the Cygnus comes alive and tractor-beams her aboard. Robots escort the crew of the Palomino to the bridge of the Cygnus, where they find the mad genius Dr. Hans Reinhardt, an Ahab with a black hole for his white whale. While the Palomino awaits repairs, it becomes clear that many of the “robots” who work on the Cygnus are in fact undead human beings, cyborgs built from its former crew. Reinhardt’s plan is revealed: to drive the Cygnus into and through the black hole. The survivors of the Palomino’s crew seize a probe ship and escape from the Cygnus, but both ships are drawn into the black hole. We see a scene of Reinhardt in torment, imprisoned in a robot body in the fires of hell. But the probe ship passes through cinematic psychedelic turbulence into a realm of heavenly light.

My thirty-fourth year was meant to be a winner. I would drink less, I would eat better, I would write my book proposal, I would walk ten miles every day, I would go to the theater, I would get a job, I would read more books and watch more movies. I would, in short, live up to my potential. All my life I’ve seen out of the corner of my eye the other me, the one who rises early, sleeps well, spends responsibly, works hard, shines with a humble yet unmistakable brilliance, and never lets anybody down, the bitch. Well, no longer.

Thirty-three! Otherwise known as the Jesus year: thirty-three being the very age Jesus Christ got his show on the road. If it was good enough for the Son of God, surely it was good enough for me. Being simply human I didn’t expect a dove from heaven—just a little self-actualization, a shimmer of success, a whiff of recognition. Nothing big. In retrospect, it might have been better to dwell on the how of Jesus reaching his potential (i.e., death) and not so much the when. But I didn’t, and it wouldn’t have made a difference: almost precisely a month after reaching this momentous age, I was throwing up a yellow substance I didn’t like the look of into every available receptacle. Scripture is silent on whether this ever happened to Jesus, but since he participated in humanity in all its fullness, maybe it did.

***

My domestic situations have always had this problem: I buy things for the other me, who has great taste, but then I don’t know what to do with them, because they’re not my things, they’re hers. Other me—McClay A, let’s call her Alice—likes delicate coffee serving sets that would turn the humdrum act of sipping coffee in the morning into a small, beautiful ritual; real me habitually buys cheap iced coffee before going to sleep, placing it on the nightstand for the morning. What happens to the coffee service? Who knows. I look at it and am as charmed as ever. I’d buy it again, I’m sure.

Around the time I realized I didn’t want to be married anymore, I started visiting Mary Wollstonecraft’s grave. I’d known it was there, behind King’s Cross railway station, for at least a decade. I had read her protofeminist tract from 1792, A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, at university, and I knew Saint Pancras Churchyard was where Wollstonecraft’s daughter, also Mary, had taken the married poet Percy Bysshe Shelley when they were falling in love. When I thought about the place, I thought of death and sex and possibility. I first visited at thirty-four, newly separated, on a cold gray day with a lover, daffodils rising around the squat cubic pillar. “MARY WOLLSTONECRAFT GODWIN,” the stone reads. “Author of A Vindication of the rights of Woman. Born 27th April, 1759. Died 10th September, 1797.” I didn’t tell him why I wanted to go there; I had a sense that Wollstonecraft would understand, and I often felt so lost that I didn’t want to talk to real people, people I wanted to love me rather than pity me, people I didn’t want to scare. I was often scared. I was frequently surprised by my emotions, by the things I suddenly needed to do or say that surged up out of nowhere.

Unexpected events had brought me graveside: when I was thirty-two, my fifty-seven-year-old mother was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s. It wasn’t genetic; no one knew why she got it. We would, the doctors said, have three to nine more years with her. Everything wobbled. This knowledge raised questions against every part of my life: Was this worth it? And this? And this? I was heading for children in the suburbs with the husband I’d met at nineteen, but that life, the one that so many people want, I doubted was right for me. I was trying to find my way as a writer, but I was jumping from genre to genre, not working out what I most wanted to say, and not taking myself seriously enough to discover it, even. Who do you tell when you start to feel these things? Everything seemed immovable. Everything seemed impossible. And yet I knew I had to change my life.

There were a string of discussions with my husband, threading from morning argument to online chat to text to phone to therapy session to dinner, where we floated ideas about open marriage and relationship breaks and moving countries and changing careers and dirty weekends. But we couldn’t agree on what was important, and I began to peel my life away from his. We decided that we could see other people. We were as honest and kind and open as we could manage as we did this, which sometimes wasn’t much. The spring I began visiting Wollstonecraft’s grave, he moved out, dismantling our bed by taking the mattress and leaving me with the frame. I took off my wedding ring—a gold band with half a line of “Morning Song” by Sylvia Plath etched on the inside—and for weeks afterward, my thumb would involuntarily reach across my palm for the warm bright circle that had gone. I didn’t throw the ring into the long grass, like women do in the movies, but a feeling began bubbling up nevertheless, from my stomach to my throat: it could fling my arms out. I was free.

At first, I took my freedom as a seventeen-year-old might: hard and fast and negronied and wild. I was thirty-four and I wanted so much out of this new phase of my life: intense sexual attraction; soulmate-feeling love that would force my life into new shapes; work that felt joyous like play but meaningful like religion; friendships with women that were fusional and sisterly; talk with anyone and everyone about what was worth living for; books that felt like mountains to climb; attempts at writing fiction and poetry and memoir. I wanted to create a life I would be proud of, that I could stand behind. I didn’t want to be ten years down the wrong path before I discovered once more that it was wrong. While I was a girl, waiting for my life to begin, my mother gave me books: The Mill on the Floss when I was ill; Ballet Shoes when I demanded dance lessons; A Little Princess when I felt overlooked. How could I find the books I needed now? I had so many questions: Could you be a feminist and be in love? Did the search for independence mean I would never be at home with anyone, anywhere? Was domesticity a trap? What was worth living for if you lost faith in the traditional goals of a woman’s life? What was worth living for at all—what degree of unhappiness, lostness, chaos was bearable? Could I even do this without my mother beside me? Or approach any of these questions if she was already fading from my life? And if I wanted to write about all this, how could I do it? What forms would I need? What genre could I be most truthful in? How would this not be seen as a problem of privilege, a childish demand for definition, narcissistic self-involvement, when the world was burning? Wouldn’t I be better off giving away all I have and putting down my books, my movies, my headphones, and my pen? When would I get sick of myself?

In our Spring issue, we published Kyra Wilder’s poem “John Wick Is So Tired.” To celebrate the poem and the recent release of John Wick: Chapter 4, we sent four reviewers to three different John Wick screenings over the course of a week.  

Tuesday, March 21: Press Preview

The first thing we noted when we entered AMC Lincoln Square 13 for the New York press screening of John Wick: Chapter 4 was that film PR girls are way nicer than their fashion industry counterparts. Check-in was a breeze, and we were informed that since we had special blue wristbands, we didn’t have to turn in our phones. We hadn’t considered that we would potentially have to turn in our phones, but were relieved nevertheless. We were handed a very large stack of papers with a large John Wick logo at the top, containing detailed information about the franchise and a long explanation of the movie’s plot, which we chose not to read too closely for fear of spoilers. This heavy stack of papers was also where we first learned that the runtime was a whopping 169 minutes. This troubled us, mostly because we had had a lot of wine with dinner and were concerned that we would have to pee. The theater was packed with agitated-seeming nonjournalists who were somehow able to secure tickets. People wove up and down the aisles in a huff, frustrated by the first-come-first-served seating. A couple of women exchanged curse words over another woman’s volume. Multiple people arrived late with full take-out bags, their lack of discretion leading us to believe that the staff of the theater were not too concerned with enforcing the rules of this AMC John Wick press preview. 

The French crime film maestro Jean-Pierre Melville once said, “What is friendship? It’s telephoning a friend at night to say, ‘Be a pal, get your gun, and come on over quickly.’ ” In the universe of John Wick, it’s pretty much that too, but it’s a thousand guns, two dozen archers, bows, arrows, knives, swords, bulletproof suits, a sundry list of exotic ammunition, an attack dog, a blind assassin, dueling pistols, a fleet of luxury attack vehicles, and a handful of classic American muscle cars. Oh, and if you could bring them all to the Sacré-Cœur, in Paris, by sunrise, that would be great, thanks.

In 1977, Jennifer Dunbar Dorn wrote to her best friend, Lucia Berlin, from the Hotel Boulderado, where she was staying while she looked for a house in Boulder, Colorado. Her “large corner room” became “a dormitory at night,” while “during the day we roll the beds into a cupboard in the hall.” She described the hotel as a “faded red brick run by post hippies,” a place for people on the make and on the move. This might not seem like a hotel that would have had its own stationery, but it did. The paper’s crest features a lantern and mountains, and the header reads HOTEL BOULDERADO in French Clarendon font: the typeface of Westerns and outlaws, of greed, gambling, and adventure. The hotel’s name, Dunbar Dorn recently pointed out to me, “is a combination of Boulder and Colorado, obviously, but the mythic El Dorado is ingrained everywhere in the West”—its lost city of gold.

I stumbled on this letter at Harvard’s Houghton Library, where a collection of Berlin’s papers are stored in a single cardboard box. Almost everything she saved over the course of her peripatetic life is compressed into this tiny space: correspondence, notebooks, reviews, manuscripts, applications for tenure. I am Berlin’s first biographer, and I often felt deeply moved as I worked through the box last summer. Berlin is my El Dorado, and I had been looking for her for so long … Though the archivists at the library had sent me scans of some of these documents during the pandemic, it wasn’t the same as touching pages she had once touched.

As I examined the yellowed paper, placing my own thumb over the smudged thumbprint at the top, I imagined Berlin reading Dunbar Dorn’s letter at her kitchen table in Oakland after a shift on the Merritt Hospital switchboard. Mostly, it’s about Dunbar Dorn’s journey from California to Colorado with her husband, Ed Dorn, and their children. Her emphasis is on their time on the road, not on their arrival—on transience over stasis and on quest over complacency, core values of the counterculture to which she, Dorn, Berlin, and their dispersed community of writers and artists loosely belonged.

For our new series Making of a Poem, we’re asking poets to dissect the poems they’ve published in our pages. Kyra Wilder’s “John Wick Is So Tired” appears in our new Spring issue, no. 243.

How did this poem start for you? Was it with an image, an idea, a phrase?

With the first line. It was something I’d thought a lot about—I run marathons, and in those tense few days before the race, when I’m drinking water and carb loading and meditating on what’s going to happen, I watch John Wick, specifically because of the way Keanu Reeves runs. He looks so tired, but he’s winning. 

In the fall of 2021, I was tapering for a marathon and then I had to go to a funeral, and suddenly my John Wick time got invaded by real grief. And John Wick was good for that, too.