Heading to the dinner party, I wondered if people there would be able to tell that I was in crisis. Out the window of the Toyota Land Cruiser—on loan, from my uncle—islands and ocean floated past. I was on the car ferry from Lopez Island to San Juan Island, in the middle of the Puget Sound. 

It was February of 2020, and I was a few months into living on Lopez. I had moved from New York City, where I was from, so that I could help start a restaurant there. This restaurant, which would open in a dockside bar, had existed in many incarnations before our project. Now my team and I—food friends who would make their way in spring—were going to revamp it. I was twenty-four, earnest, electrified at my luck. 

But things had begun to go awry. Switching hands of the restaurant had caused local discord. Around town, strangers peppered me with questions about the future of the restaurant that I never seemed to answer in a satisfying way. The island’s Facebook groups were exploding with commenters fearful that outsiders were ruining something good, as dissident voices defended us with pleading emojis. At the worksite: anonymous, ominous notes. The island’s dogs had begun to bark at me. Insomnia and howling winds yawned unsettlingly into beautiful sunrise. I had come to the conclusion that the spirits of the island were angry with me. Everything felt big, dark, and personal. 

So when Isabel invited me to her house on San Juan for a murder mystery dinner party for her friend’s birthday, I was grateful. I credited my glee to being excited to socialize. Wondering at the immensity of my excitement, I realized there was more: I was free to go where I pleased.

And despite the man-made lightning that scrapes intimacy from the parks with its halogen spies, where municipal razor blades have shaved the grass’s chlorophyll into waves of plush green. Yards upon yards of verde que te quiero verde in Parque Forestal all straightened up, pretending to be some creole Versailles, like a scenic backdrop for democratic leisure. Or more like a terrarium, like Japanese landscaping, where even the weeds are subject to the bonsai salon’s military buzzcuts. Where security cameras the mayor dreamed up now dry up the saliva of a kiss in the bigoted chemistry of urban control. Cameras so they can romanticize a beautiful park painted in oils, with blond children on swing sets, their braids flying in the wind. Lights and lenses hidden by the flower in the senator’s buttonhole, so they can keep an eye on all the dementia drooling on the benches. Old-timers with watery blue eyes and poodle pooches cropped by the same hand that hacks away at the cypresses.

But even then, with all this surveillance, somewhere past the sunset turning bronze in the city smog. In the shadows that fall outside the diameter of grass recruited by the streetlamps. Barely touching the wet basting stitch of thicket, the top of a foot peeks out, then stiffens and sinks its nails into the dirt. A foot that’s lost its sneaker in the straddling of rushed sex, the public space paranoia. Extremities entwine, legs arching and dry paper lips that rasp, “Not so hard, that hurts, slowly now, oh, careful, someone’s coming.”

Couples walk by on the path, holding hands, gathering bouquets of orange blossoms on their way down legality’s shining aisle. Future newlyweds who pretend they don’t see the cohabiting snakes rubbing against each other in the grass. Who say under their breath, “Those were two men, did you notice?” and keep walking, thinking about their future male children, the boys, warning them about the parks, about those types who walk alone at night and watch couples from behind the bushes. Like that voyeur who was watching them just a little while ago. He watched as they made love in the sweetness of the park because they didn’t have money for a motel, but they enjoyed it more than ever, there in the green outdoors, with that spectator who couldn’t applaud because his hands were busy running full steam ahead, leaking out an “Ay, I’m going to come, slow down won’t you.” So the woman said to the man, “You know I can’t if someone’s watching.” But at that stage, “I can’t” was a moan silenced by fever and “someone’s watching” just a sprinkling of Egyptian eyes swimming among the leaves. An overwhelming vertigo that bred a pair of bronze pupils inside her, in the eyes that sprung from her pregnancy. And when the boy turned fifteen, she didn’t say, “Be careful in parks,” because she knew those golden eyes were the park’s thirsty leaves. That’s why the warning stuck in her throat. Maybe “Be careful in parks” sums up that green gossamer, that hurried drawing back of his young foreskin’s curtain. That launching of himself into the park to wander over the gravel like an asp in heat, playing the fool, he smokes a cigarette so that the man following him can ask for a light and say, “What are you up to?” And, already knowing the reply, gently pushes him behind the bushes. And there, in all that damp, he kindles the curled pubic forest, his lizard tongue sucking on balls of wild hierbabuena. His fiery kiss climbing to the tip of that selenite stem. And while cars and buses careen along the ribbon of coastline, the boy hands over all the stagnation of his fragile fifteen years, years now shipwrecked like paper boats in the soaked sheets of grass. And who cares if the rustling branches tell him that someone is watching, because he knows how hard it is to see a porn movie in this country; he’s watched before, too, and he’s familiar with the technique, parting branches to join the park’s incestuous trinity.

A is for ABC book. An Encyclopedia of Gardening for Colored Children, a new book by Jamaica Kincaid and Kara Walker, is an alphabetical sequence of lavishly illustrated, crisp lyric essays that takes readers on a tour of gardening, past and present, and serves as a teaching tool for children to learn about flora while practicing their letters. But at its roots, An Encyclopedia is a postcolonial excavation of the tyrannical alphabetization that has formed America since its origins. As the historian Patricia Crain writes in The Story of A: From The New England Primer to The Scarlet Letter, her investigation of the alphabet’s chokehold on American letters, “The alphabet is the technology with which American culture has long spoken to its children and within which it has symbolically represented and formed them.” Teaching children how to use the alphabet might seem like a natural, lawful neutral activity: here are the building blocks that create our communication system. But alphabetization as the default mode for organizing subjectivity—“As easy as ABC”—is a recent, and surprisingly problematic, phenomenon.

B is for Bible. The New England Primer, the first reader designed for the American colonies and the foundational text for schoolchildren in the United States before 1790, presents the alphabet via Biblically themed and morally didactic rhyming couplets: “In Adam’s Fall / We sinned all,” the A ditty goes, and the letters march on a mostly tragic journey from there, with dour little images that illustrate each couplet. Today, ABC books do lots of things. Many use the genre to provide a parade of content: A is for activist; R is for Rolex. Alphabet books aimed at adult audiences often satirize the genre. The Cubies’ ABC, from 1913, skewers Futurist artists in alphabetical order, shooting them down in doggerel: “B is for Beauty as Brancusi views it. / (The Cubies all vow he and Braque take the Bun.) / First you seize all that’s plain to the eye, then you lose it; / Next you search for the Soul and proceed to abuse it. / (They tell me it’s easy and no end of fun.)” ABC books sometimes even undercut the well-trodden form itself, with a wink or some wishfulness. Michaël Escoffier’s Take Away the A: An Alphabeast of a Book! suggests an alternate universe for a world without each letter: “Without the D, Dice Are Ice” depicts dice clinking in drinking glasses. Kincaid and Walker’s Encyclopedia embraces all these modes, from instructive to subversive to lyric to sly. Here, A is for apple, but it’s also for “Apple and Adam, too,” and “also for Amaranth.” A gets three entries; S, T, U, and W each get two; the rest get one. The rule seems to be that there is no rule, bucking the alphabet’s insistence on pattern.

Colored in the new book’s title gives a jump scare. Segregation leaps to mind. But the chromatic anachronism colored is also a literal description of the book, with its densely saturated, Crayola-bright pages and Walker’s deft watercolors.

There was a time in my life when I went to many formal dinner parties. Were they parties, exactly? They were dinners orchestrated to celebrate something—a book, or an exhibition—or to raise money. Older and better-off friends often invited us to these events. I was young and newly married to my second husband. We had three and then four children, and pennies slipped through our fingers. For winter I owned a black dress with a keyhole neckline, and for spring a thrift-shop chiffon skirt and an embroidered tunic the color of spilled tea. I imagine our friends thought we would enliven the table.

As I said, we went to many of these dinners, but one evening put a stop to it. It must have been springtime, as I was wearing my skirt and tunic. My husband wore his tuxedo. Before we left the apartment there was the usual brouhaha about his bow tie. In the movie version of Peter Pan, starring Mary Martin, Mr. Darling (Cyril Ritchard, who in an thrill-inducing about-face, also plays Captain Hook) cannot tie his bow tie properly and the scene devolves: he must tie his bow; he must go to this dinner; if he does not, he will lose his job, and the family will be in the poorhouse! He practices by tying it around a bedpost, but, after all, the bedpost can’t go to the party! My children had watched this movie perhaps fifty times, and whenever we went out to these dinner parties they would circle their father as he tried to tie his bow tie, chanting, To the poorhouse, to the poorhouse! As usual, in this grim ambience, we left them to their very tall babysitter, Ann, a Barnard student who looked like an elongated Alice; in the afternoons, she often took them across the park to the Met to see the mummies.

The dinner was at a converted warehouse in Tribeca, a vast high-ceilinged room swathed with gray silk; the effect was a tent of fog. Large vases on each table were covered with moss—from them leapt silver branches entwined with fairy lights. At each place, a tiny silver vase held two or three flustered pink anemones. The party was to celebrate the installation of a huge winged metal sculpture that commemorated—I can’t recall. There were drinks, and hors d’oeuvres on trays. As usual, I hadn’t had time to eat during the day and ate too many of these too fast. I had also turned my ankle on a cobblestone when we arrived, so stood on one foot, regretting my stiletto heels. Stanley Kubrick’s last film, Eyes Wide Shut, had just opened, and the dim room buzzed with conversation: “And what did you think of Mouth Wide Open?” I heard one woman say to another, her diamond bracelets snatching the light.

I found my place card. The seat to my left was empty. It was to remain empty all evening, but the chair, with its ghostly inhabitant did not then fill me with a sense of foreboding, though it meant I would have to talk to the person on my right, exclusively. It transpired that my dinner companion was a man in his mid-eighties. He introduced himself. We established that we were both friends of so-and-so. He was immediately recognizable to me, even then, as a man who had lived his life adjacent to power. His evening wear was immaculate; he wore a forest-green brocade bow tie. He preferred the country to the city, he told me. It was wonderful to muck around in the garden. Recently, a friend had said to me that if she heard the phrase country house one more time she would scream. I thought of that. Which country? I asked. He had a place in Connecticut. His wife—was her name Patsy?—grew roses. Sad she couldn’t be here tonight, laid up with a cold. Prone to them. We agreed something was going around. Here on your own? he asked. I indicated my husband across the table, engaged in animated conversation. It was a large round table for ten people, and I could just make out his voice, as distant as a ship-to-shore radio. We moved on. Did I write, or paint, or what? he asked me. I admitted that I wrote for a magazine. Amazing what girls get up to, he said. His own daughter had gone to law school. How many daughters did he have? It turned out we both had three.

“Pedro Lemebel, one of the most important queer writers of twentieth-century Latin America,” writes Gwendolyn Harper, his translator, was “a protean figure: a performance artist, radio host, and newspaper columnist, a tireless activist whose life spanned some of Chile’s most dramatic decades. But above all he was known for his furious, dazzling crónicas—short prose pieces that blend loose reportage with fictional and essayistic mode. … Many of them depict Chile’s AIDS crisis, which in 1984 began to spread through Santiago’s sexual underground, overlapping with the final years of the Pinochet dictatorship.” Over the next few weeks, the Review will be publishing several of these crónicas, newly translated by Harper, as part of a brief series. You can read the first installment, “Anacondas in the Park,” here.

On the edge of the Alameda, practically bumping up against the old Church of Saint Francis, the gay club flashes a fuchsia neon sign that sparks the sinful festivities. An invitation to go down the steps and enter the colorful furnace of music-fever sweating on the dance floor. The fairy parade descends the uneven staircase like goddesses of a Mapuche Olympus. High and mighty, their stride gliding right over the threadbare carpet. Magnificent and exacting as they adjust the safety pins in their freshly ironed pants. Practically queens, if not for the loose red stitches of a quickie fix. Practically stars, except for the fake jeans logo tattooed on one of the asscheeks.

Some are practically teenagers, in bright sportswear and Adidas sneakers, wrapped in springtime’s pastel colors, healthy glow on loan from a blush compact. Practically girls, if not for the creased faces and the frightful bags under their eyes. Giddy from rushing to get there, they show up tittering each night at the dance cathedral inside the basement of an old Santiago cinema, where you can still see the black-and-gold Etruscan friezes and Hellenic columns, where the stench of sweaty seat cushions hits hard once you finally get past the burly bouncer at the door. That’s where spongers circle, hovering around any gay man who might cough up their cover. We’ll figure it out inside, they croon into ears with little dangly earrings. But the gays know that, once inside, the most they’ll get is “… have we met?” because every taxi boy heads straight to the bar, where the grannies flaunt their piggy banks, rattling ice in a glass of imported whisky.

The bar at a gay club is a good place to meet someone—it’s the area with the best light for spotting the witch who never sees the sun, always underground like the roots of an AIDS-ridden philodendron. The same one who cried sapphire tears, forgiving herself for all her dirty tricks, the spitting in drinks, the broken condoms, the falsified positive test results that aided and abetted a few girls’ suicides. Her schemes for infecting half of Santiago because she didn’t want to die alone. It’s that I have so many friends, she said. The same Miss Perverse who’s back again, more alive than ever, laughing luciferously with a drink in hand.

Here’s where they pour the gin and tonics, pisco sours, pisco sores, pisco colas, and loca-colas singing along to “Desesperada” by our darling Marta Sánchez, which always makes the disco babes go crazy. The girls in shorts who come up to the bar breathlessly asking for water with ice, elbowing the office worker who’s still wearing his tie and who keeps eyeing the door in case someone from his work shows up.

This morning, before breakfast, I played nineteen games of Scrabble on my phone. I won thirteen. It took less than an hour. Over the past twenty-five years, I’ve played Scrabble every day, predominantly on ISC.RO, a website hosted in Romania that allows for games that are no longer than three minutes. On my phone, I use the Scrabble app and play a bot set to “expert.” I had meant to play only two or three games today, but as has been happening since 1999, I found that impossible.

These facts embarrass me, and I’m concerned I might appear to be bragging, announcing that I can finish a Scrabble game against a highly skilled bot in less time than it takes to brush one’s teeth. I’m not bragging. I’m confessing to being addicted to an ostensible word game that occupies more space in my brain than I’d prefer. Addicts are necessarily experts when it comes to the things that enslave them. No sommelier or “mixologist” can testify to any aspect of an alcoholic beverage with more expertise than a run-of-the-mill drunk playing keno in a dive bar.

Run-of-the-mill drunk in a dive bar. I was one once. I’d wake up determined to have just two or three drinks, then have many, many more than two or three. As with playing Scrabble, doing otherwise felt impossible. In Alcoholics Anonymous, we’re told that it’s common to substitute one addiction for another. Surely, I tell myself, this new unmanageability is preferable to the old one. It’s possible I’m right. It’s also possible I’m wrong.

***

The quantity and quality of consternation caused me by the publication of Alec Wilkinson’s Moonshine in 1985 is difficult to articulate. This utterance should prove probative. If we are in a foreword, an afterword, or perhaps ideally a middleword, we will shortly be in a model of muddle at the very end of the clarity spectrum away from Moonshine itself, with its amber lucidity, as someone said of the prose of someone, sometime, maybe of Beckett, maybe of Virgil, who knows, throw it into the muddle. The consternation caused me by this book is even starker next to the delight of reading the book itself before the personal accidents of my response are figured in. I will essay to detail those accidents, but I would like to first say something about the method of the writing.

Alec Wilkinson is one of two literary grandsons of Joseph Mitchell, the grandfather of the poetry of fact. “The poetry of fact” is a phrase I momentarily fancied I coined, but the second literary grandson of Joseph Mitchell, Ian Frazier, corrected me, and I have assented to his claim that he coined the phrase. One’s vanities are silly and dangerous. It is a vanity to think to say there are but two grandsons of Joseph Mitchell as well. There are doubtless dozens and, of course, granddaughters, too; what I mean is that Alec Wilkinson and Ian Frazier are the grandsons with whom I am most familiar, and most fond, and so it is convenient to sloppily say they are it.

What is the poetry of fact? Good question. Since I am not the coiner of the term and, at best, a dilettante in its practice, I may be excused, I hope, if my answer is wanting, but I vow to do my best. I, alas, have brought it up. When the justice of the peace who conducted my marriage, Judge Leonard Hentz of Sealy, Texas, asked if anyone objected to the imminent union, he looked up and said, of our sole witness, “Well, hell, he’s the only one here, and y’all brought him, so let’s get on with it.”

The poetry of fact is the ordering for power of empirical facts, historical facts, narrative elements, objects, dialogues, clauses, phrases, words—it is the construction of catalogues of things large or small into arrays of power. The power of the utterance is the point. The preferred mode of delivery is the declarative sentence, simple or compound, without subordination or dependent clauses—without what Mr. Frazier has called “riders.” Power in this instance—in any writing, really—is to be understood as a function of where things are placed. The end of a series or sequence or catalogue or paragraph or chapter or essay or book is the position of what we will call primary thrust. It is what will linger in the brain uppermost because it is lattermost. The beginning of an array, large or small, is the position of secondary thrust: the “first impression” that gets lost but never quite recedes. The middle of an array is the tertiary thrust—the middle gets lost in the middle, ordinarily. This is the middle’s job. Games can be played with these positions of emphasis. A sockdolager, to employ Twain, can be buried in the middle where, because it is a sockdolager, it is not exactly buried and may constitute a surprise. The emphatic middle, let us call it, installs an irony, raises an eyebrow whether anyone realizes it or not. An “unemphatic” end also installs an eyebrow. Strunk and White’s The Elements of Style is onto but the very tip of this iceberg with its Elementary Principles of Composition #18: “Place the emphatic words of a sentence at the end.” Were it “The words at the end of a sentence are emphatic,” they’d have been closer to the nuanced complexity of the poetry of fact, but let’s move on.

If you’re a comics lover or want to dip your foot into the comics world, look no further than this year’s slate of Eisner Award nominees. The Eisners are given for excellence and achievement in comics and among the most prestigious honors given to comic creators and their work. They are given to comics published in the United States, though creators themselves do not need to be American.

The award began in 1988, and as of 2024, Eisners are given in 32 categories. This year’s nominees include over 150 different titles, both in print and online. Several titles and creators were nominated in multiple categories.

Here are a handful of the categories and their nominees.

Grab your coffee, kick up your feet, and dive into our best stuff from another eventful week in the world of books and reading.

Here’s to wrapping up the week with a big serving of bookish goodness!

Break out your TBR and brace yourself for an onslaught of exciting mysteries and thrillers out this year! Goodreads has put together a list of the most-anticipated mystery and thriller new releases. These are the titles that have been added to users’ Want to Read shelves the most often.

Some big names immediately jump out–fans of Ruth Ware, Harlan Coben, and Akwaeke Emezi, there’s something here for you. Find the sequel to a Reese’s Book Club Pick, a new book from the author of The 7 1/2 Deaths of Evelyn Hardcastle, a detective mystery surrounding the reappearance of a missing girl, and much much more.

Sony Pictures dropped the first full-length trailer for the adaptation of It Ends With Us yesterday, and I have thoughts! Coming to theaters August 9, the films stars Blake Lively as main character Lily Bloom (whose unironic dream is to own a flower shop, I cannot), Justin Baldoni, and, inexplicably, Jenny Slate, playing it straighter than I knew she could. 

I read the book back in 2022 with sincere hopes that it would validate the hype (spoiler: it did not), and I’ve been waiting to see if/how Hollywood could clean up this messy story that starts as a romance, takes a turn into domestic fiction about trauma and abuse, and ends up trying to be an inspirational tale of female empowerment. As Slate’s Laura Miller put it, “Hoover supplies angsty love stories, extensive sex scenes, catchy premises, and outrageous plot twists. Plenty of popular fiction relies on these proven winners, but it’s less common to see them all deployed at once.” 

First reaction: this looks much better than it has any business being for a movie based on such a poorly written book. But I’m getting ahead of myself.

If you’ve somehow made it to mid-2024 without knowing what the Colleen Hoover TikTok phenomenon is about, the tl;dr is that Lily falls for bad boy/doctor Ryle Kincaid, who turns out to be emotionally and physically abusive. Realizing that she has replicated a pattern of abuse she witnessed in her parents’ relationship, Lily must decide whether to stay or go. 

Since the adaptation was first announced, my biggest question has been how the film would handle the abuse, which is graphically on the page in Hoover’s novel. From the trailer, it looks like Baldoni, who also served as director, has chosen to indicate Ryle’s violent tendencies (we see him smashing a glass) and their aftermath (Lily shows up with a black eye) without actually showing him attacking Lily, but that could just be the trailer. Will there be Big Little Lies-style physical assault on screen? What did they decide to do about the scene in which Ryle becomes violent while he and Lily are having sex? There are still a lot of ways this could go sideways.

Gia wants to disappear. This is an ordinary desire while in pain. In moments of hardship, it is tempting to admire the ascetic. The imagined glory of solitude is that our inner life will become a source of endless pleasure. Of course, this is fiction. Everyone is touched by loneliness, while alone and in company. To bear it, we must find something from beyond to sustain us. This is what Nicolette Polek’s Bitter Water Opera seeks.

Polek’s debut novel, published last month by Graywolf, shows us the mechanics of a mind negotiating a rupture. It’s easy to say that Bitter Water Opera is about a breakup, but that would be a narrow view. As in real life, the relationship comes undone downstream from a more preeminent but obscured event in the emotional life of one or both parties. Gia’s relationship seems fine. It is sparsely characterized, mostly through memories of excursions dotted with palms and bougainvillea. But for Gia, this pleasantness is intolerable. She starts acting erratically, flirting with strangers. Soon after, she leaves both him and her post in a university film department. Her mental state is vague, made up of a loose association of memories, summoning trinket-like facts, like “the prevalent tone in nature is the key of E.” She has traded a life in exchange for something she has not yet learned to want. But what is to be done when desire turns its cheek to you? What is there to want when you’ve stopped wanting what you wanted? In the absence of wanting, it is helpful to find a human example to follow, try to insinuate yourself in their map of desire and its attendant habits.

Through the figure of the dancer and choreographer Marta Becket, Gia tries to summon a model for a life she could find agreeable. “Marta got through without needing, grieving, or waiting on someone, and now, after death, I was her witness, hoping that she, in some act of imitation on my part, could fix my life.” Becket was a real woman who abandoned her life as a ballerina in New York in favor of the oblivion of Death Valley, where she dedicated herself to running a previously abandoned recreation hall to showcase her one-woman plays and ballets. At the Amargosa Opera House, Becket performed her own choreography for nearly fifty years. In the early days, her only audience members were the faces of heroes and loved ones that she had painted into the trompe l’oeil mezzanines, from which they permanently applauded. Her husband, Polek writes, was off with the prostitutes in town, trying to withstand the fact that Marta did not need him. Eventually she became a cult figure, luring crowds, the press, and lost women like Gia into her orbit, even after death.

After Gia writes her a letter, the ghost of Marta enters Gia’s life, and with her a flurry of activity. The pair have full days together: painting, picknicking, hiking. For a while Gia pantomimes Marta’s actions, but it soon becomes evident that she is not yet ready to stand up to the task of living (she attempts to get back together with her ex-boyfriend). The ghost of Marta exits, taking her watercolors with her. Gia descends into catatonia. Towards the middle of the novel, Gia looks out over the pond outside a house in the country where she’s staying alone and sees the floating corpse of a dead deer. This visceral encounter with a rotting animal draws Gia out of the misty, desultory realm she has lived in for so long and forces her to contend with the bare facts of nature, and the nature of herself: she does not live the life of an embodied subject. Her central problem is her tendency for “limerence,” as she calls it, which leaves her chronically unable to connect with the present. But this insight is brief, and an epiphany does not cohere. “The smell faded for good, and with it my revelation.” Here she is confronted with the mystery of herself: something has peeked out from the curtain behind which her mind stages a secret play. It is a glimpse at something that will eventually be revealed in full, but she must wait. Insight tends to come soon after we are emptied out completely. As the epigraph notes, “Blessed are the poor in spirit,” for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.

In the new Spring issue of The Paris Review, we published an Art of Poetry interview with Alice Notley, conducted by Hannah Zeavin. To mark the occasion, we commissioned a series of short essays that analyze Notley’s works. We hope readers will enjoy discovering, or rediscovering, these lectures, essays, and poems.

This is another useless plaque for you all including the schoolchildren my brother may have accidentally mortared.

—Alice Notley, “The Iliad and Postmodern War”

In the new Spring issue of The Paris Review, we published an Art of Poetry interview with Alice Notley, conducted by Hannah Zeavin. To mark the occasion, we commissioned a series of short essays that analyze Notley’s works. We hope readers will enjoy discovering, or rediscovering, these lectures, essays, and poems.

I was not raised with any religion. We weren’t told that God was dead; having never existed, he’d had no opportunity to die. Instead, the material world had its own beauty, if occasionally cold or mathematical: the paradox of particle and wave, the litanies of astounding facts and figures (do you know how a snake sheds its skin?). It was a view of life ruled by information: sensible, finite, hard.

And so, when poets find the confidence to prophesy, I often doubt. If someone tells me in so many words that they are about to deliver me another Book of Luminous Things, as Miłosz memorably titled one anthology, my brow furrows, even if I remain curious. When I was in college, I was in a workshop with a poet who was writing their dissertation on “vatic” poetry of the twentieth century. After looking up the word, I always found it slightly amusing. How easily the mystic could be isolated, another device in the poet’s bag of tricks. Poets are used to the idea of other voices speaking through them (don’t get them started on the etymology of inspire), but an overreliance on a private line to a higher power can begin to feel cheap. There’s a reason Berryman called Rilke a jerk (though of course, pot, kettle).

But when I first read Alice Notley’s sprawling, twisting, hilarious, and deadly serious poem “The Prophet,” I regained a certain measure of belief. The poem, written in the late seventies, stretches across a dozen pages in long lines alternating with short, a little like Whitman’s exultations spilling over the margin. Who’s speaking? Hard to say—you feel the voice, but lines ricochet in different directions. Take the first two: “They say there is a dying star which is traveling in two directions. / Don’t brood over how you may have behaved last night.” Nearly opposite ideas—one cosmic, one personal—but somehow fusing. Then language rains down like brimstone. It seems to never stop, never waiting for you to “place” it—it’s the difference between a prophet in a white beard and white robes and another speaker who is at once more ordinary, more elusive, and more terrifying. Commands (“You must often luminously tell / The grossest joke you know to all those stiffs in the other room”), suggestions (“Perhaps you should / Call money ‘green zinnias’ ”), declarations (“Science has almost made it that you yourself hardly ever perceive / anything”), questions (“Why must your / Husband occasionally seem to think other women are more wonderful / than you?”), and observations (“When you / do the mistaking, / The taco-&-vodka man laughs wickedly”) intertwine and contradict, throwing up scenes and ideas and dismantling them just as fast. The poem is studded with New York scenes and TV-show flickers, but it’s also a mind voyaging through and beyond the quotidian, held together with confidence from a place you can’t observe.