I lay motionless for a long time by the little quicksilver stream that even now, at the end of summer, ran constantly down over the last granite steps of the valley floor, with that proverbial babble familiar to me from some dim and distant past, only to give up the ghost without a sound on the beach and seep away.

—W. G. Sebald, Campo Santo

The pebbles, rocks, and boulders that can be found in the stream that runs down into the Bay of Ficajola, Corsica, share a waypoint but not an origin. Some have been dislodged from adjacent hills and mountains by rain and conveyed downstream until friction and gravity curtail their transport to the sea. Some preexist the flow of water, their geological makeup stubbornly resisting any attempt to shift or dissolve them. Others have been placed there deliberately, to serve as stepping stones or to dam the stream and divert its course. They differ in age by millennia. But there in the riverbed, the ragged edges of their cleaved histories worn smooth by the agency of the current, the stones share a resemblance.

Pick up Chloe Aridjis’s Dialogue with a Somnambulist and open it somewhere shy of halfway and find a piece of writing called “Nail – Poem – Suit.” It is only one page long. Read it. Ask yourself what it is that you just read. A story? A prose poem? An essay? A portrait? When is the last time you couldn’t quite answer that question when confronted with a piece of contemporary writing? In our world of literary hyperprofessionalization it is not a question that comes up very often, and you may have to reach back into literary history to remember the writers who once provoked a similar uncertainty in you. Writers like Borges, writers like Kafka. Or even further back, to the undefinable and uncontainable prose of Thomas Browne’s Urn Burial, or those slivers of Sappho. Writers who thought of language as painters think of paint: not as means to an end but as the precious thing in itself.

Within this single page of Chloe’s three things collide—that nail, a poem, a suit—and all within one man’s consciousness, although this consciousness is rendered externally, by a voice that comes from who knows where. But describing Chloe is hard: Why not read the whole thing for yourself, right now?

A man walks down the street trying to recollect the final lines of an unfinished poem he had been composing two nights ago when the phone rang. It was his seventy-four-year-old mother calling to remind him of the suit she’d ordered for his birthday, now ready for collection at the tailor’s, although it was likely alterations would have to be made. He reaches the corner and treads on a large corrugated nail that goes rolling off the pavement and into the street. The man’s first thought is that this nail has fallen out from somewhere inside him; his second thought is that it dropped out of the woman wheeling a bicycle a few metres ahead. His third thought is that the nail fell out of the teenager with the pierced lip who delivers the post each morning. Unable to draw any conclusions, the man casts one final glance at the nail now lying parallel to the tire of a parked car and returns to the matter of the unfinished poem, which, should he ever complete it, will surely fit him better than the tailor-made suit.

What’s your favorite Dawn Powell book? I’m beginning this way because critical essays on Dawn Powell always emphasize her obscurity, her failure to achieve fame or fortune in her lifetime (1896–1965) despite her enormous output. Just once, I want to skip that part. Let’s pretend I’m writing this from a parallel universe where Dawn Powell is the literary legend she deserves to be, where everyone knows the story of the Ohio-born New Yorker whose sparkling, lacerating fiction distilled the spirit of the city. And maybe you really do have a favorite Dawn Powell book. Mine is A Time to Be Born (1942), no question—the other day I was rereading it in the park and attracting stares because I kept laughing at its farcical scenes and snappy one-liners (“They couldn’t have disliked each other more if they’d been brothers”). But you might instead be partial to The Locusts Have No King (1948), or to her luminous short-story collection, Sunday, Monday, and Always (1952). Or maybe you prefer The Diaries of Dawn Powell, 1931–1965, which weren’t even written for publication (they weren’t printed until 1995) but rank among her funniest work. If you love those diaries and have a trollish sense of humor (which, if you love Dawn, you probably do), you might give me a joke answer: Your favorite Dawn Powell book is Yow.

Yow was Dawn Powell’s first and only children’s book project—as she put it in her diary, “a story to be read aloud.” All its characters were cats; the conceit was “a complete cat-world with humans as pets.” She wrote it in 1950. No, 1952. Actually, 1954. Make that 1955. Okay, 1956. Just kidding. Yow doesn’t exist. Or, rather, it exists only in the diaries, as a project that Powell is constantly on the verge of starting. She spent the final sixteen years of her life resolving over and over—for real this time!—to write “the cat book.” Even on her deathbed, Powell refused to give up on Yow. “Drying up, weak, no appetite,” she wrote in one of her last entries ever. “Will take liquid opium plus pills I guess. God how wonderful if I could get some writing done—if, for instance, I could knock off the cat book just for fun.”

Heaven knows it’s not unusual for writers to have ideas and not follow through on them. (You should see my diaries.) But it fascinates me that Powell was so utterly defeated by a kids’ book about kitty cats, because writing usually came so easily to her. From the twenties onward, she published a new novel every other year, in addition to ten plays and around a hundred short stories in her lifetime. On the side, for extra cash, she churned out book reviews and the occasional Hollywood screenplay. She did all this while managing her institutionalized son’s medical care, her husband’s alcoholism, and her highly active social life in New York City (and, relatedly, her own borderline alcoholism). Powell had many problems, but writer’s block was never one of them. On February 14, 1962, she recorded the death of her husband: “Joe died at about 2:30.” Five days later, she wrote: “Fatigued, numb, brainfogged yet must reassemble novel. … Must have it done by Monday.” And she did.

Yet Yow wouldn’t come. Hubris, it appears, was at least partly her downfall: she assumed that a children’s book would be easy to write, a mindless hack job. Her diaries are full of self-reminders to get Yow over with, as if it were a dental cleaning. On April 2, 1950: “Remember to do cat book for Julia Ellsworth Ford juvenile prize.” July 15, 1954: “Plan to finish Eva story, also ‘Yow’ story over weekend, maybe.” December 16, 1961: “Will do the Scrubwoman story and ‘Yow.’ ” March 15, 1965: “Getting excited and clarified on novel. Would like to rush it—also do the lovely play and the ‘Summer Rose’ one and the cat one.” Even in that deathbed entry, “the cat book” isn’t a grand plan; it’s something she hopes to “knock off.”

For our series Making of a Poem, we’re asking poets to dissect the poems they’ve published in our pages. D. A. Powell’s “As for What the Rain Can Do” appears in our new Fall issue, no. 245.

How did this poem start for you?

This poem began as a silence of wishing. As one does when falling silent. One wishes a something that isn’t happening. Or a something that is happening but should happen (one wishes) differently. In this case, I was in my kitchen nook. Outside it was raining. But raining in that dire way—trees falling, streets flooding. And endlessly so. San Francisco was at the bottom of what meteorologists were calling an atmospheric river. In thirsty California, rain is so often wished for. And now here I was, wishing it away. I didn’t want to be against the rain.

Was there a certain word or image that catalyzed your writing?

When I was first hired as a bartender by the W Hotel in Seattle, the brand was still owned by Starwood, an indistinct consolidated corporation that has since been subsumed into the ravenous belly known as Marriott. There was a lengthy process involved in getting the job. I interviewed twice: once in the HR office and then a second time downstairs with the manager of the hotel restaurant and lounge. After being hired, I attended a mandatory, introductory eight-hour job training that was quite similar to the one I’d experienced prior to beginning a regrettable stint at Starbucks. I was stuffed into a room with about twenty other new hires—everything from housekeepers to sous-chefs to servers to maintenance workers—and we were each inundated with Starwood history. Starwood business policies. Starwood subsidiary family trees.

We watched videos. We read dense packets filled with glowing customer surveys and reviews. We broke into small groups, and we were quizzed about the things that we learned. We won prizes—Starwood-engraved keychains, W Seattle pens, and the like—for each answer we got right. These gifts would be tossed about the room by the two HR workers who gave these training sessions, and they would clap with absurd enthusiasm each time. Their gusto was on brand with that of a game-show host or some seasoned motivational speaker as they shouted into their blouse-pinned microphones.

“And you get a prize!”

“And YOU get a prize!”

The 2023 Booker Prize Shortlist has been announced! Chosen from 163 novels, this year’s shortlist is comprised of six novels that span the globe and the decades. Notably, this year’s entire shortlist is by authors never previously shortlisted for the Booker Prize, including two debut novels — Western Lane by Chetna Maroo and If I Survive You by Jonathan Escoffery. Novels by Irish writers made up a third of the longlist for the first time in the prize’s history and two of those authors have gone on to make the shortlist, Paul Murray and Paul Lynch. Overall the shortlist is made up of two Irish, one British, one Canadian, and two American authors.

If you’re a reader of kidlit, then it’s more than likely that you’ve heard of Kekla Magoon, prolific author of over 20 books for children and young adults. In addition to writing books for nearly every age and across a wide range of genres — from historical fiction to sci-fi to contemporary realistic to picture book biographies — Magoon has also garnered multiple awards and honors for her work. She’s the winner of the John Steptoe New Talent Award, the Boston Globe Horn Book Award, and the NAACP Image Award. She’s collected numerous Coretta Scott King Honors as well as being a National Book Award longlist and finalist author. In 2021, she received the prestigious Margaret Edwards Award, given by the American Library Association for a lasting contribution to young adult literature.

Across the wide-ranging genres and topics of her work, Magoon often writes about teens and kids facing injustice in everyday life while still dealing with issues that feel relatable, such as friendship drama, characters wanting to prove themselves, and the ups and downs of coming of age in a complicated world. Her work can run the range from serious to funny, but her larger-than-life characters ground her fiction and make them relatable to readers. When it comes to her nonfiction, Magoon tends to write about Civil Rights and American history in the second half of the 20th century, and she’s written seven biographies for very young writers about famous and influential Black leaders.

There really is no wrong place to start in reading Magoon’s work! One of her more recognized works is X: A Novel, co-written with Ilyasah Shabazz, which is a novel account of Malcolm X’s teenage years. That’s a great novel to pick up, but below are three books that showcase Magoon’s range as an author and are all excellent entry points into her work!

A decades-long vegetarian writing about cannibalism in horror novels? That sounds like the start of a bad joke. Yet here we are. Cannibalistic horror is not a subgenre I’ve ever particularly sought out, and yet I’ve realized recently that it’s a subgenre I’ve read quite a bit, sometimes intentionally, often not. Maybe that’s because my philosophy with books is generally the weirder the better, and it doesn’t get much weirder (or more horrifying) than cannibalism. Most of these books incorporate a heaping helping of absurdism into their horror, so much so that some of these books could probably be considered more satire than horror. But don’t get me wrong: there’s plenty of horror to be had, too.

It’s probably obvious to say that these books all come with some major content warnings, but let’s just put it this way: there were a number of books I chose not to put on this list because they just went a little too far. All of these books incorporate cannibalism, which usually also comes with some blood and gore, not to mention murder. If you’re not up for that, this horror subgenre probably isn’t for you. Period.

Now, the real horror begins. Bon appétit!

Book clubs have always been popular, but they boomed during the COVID-19 pandemic when people were unable to leave their homes to attend in-person meetups. It largely moved online since then, prompting many to launch their virtual book clubs. Many celebrities beyond Oprah and Reese started their own. Schools followed suit. Companies even developed book club programs for their employees. Book clubs also became a business by itself, with companies providing setup and logistics for other businesses.

And then brands big and small also jumped on the bandwagon. Media and tech companies such as Netflix and Apple started their own book clubs for their customers. Small businesses also took advantage of the trend by launching various virtual book clubs. In lieu of face-to-face meetings, they did virtual sessions via Zoom. Some businesses, however, went back to doing it in person, pairing their products, such as food and wine, with books and signing sessions. Some even charged tickets for these events.

This trend is not going away anytime soon.

Traditional book clubs like Oprah’s and Reese’s have their own audiences, which are typically adult females. However, there’s a new wave that’s capturing the attention of young people: celebrity book clubs for Gen Z.

If you think of yourself as a writer, chances are you’re going to have more blank notebooks than you can fill in a lifetime, a grudge against at least one stationery store, and a ton of pens. This goes double if you are a writer who has ever tried to get into something like bullet journaling. While most of our favorite writers are not influencers per se, it is sometimes fun to bring a little something from their working lives into our own. No one believes, or no one would admit to believing, that this will actually have any real effect on your own writing except, perhaps, to get you to sit down and face it more often. Isn’t that why we really hoard office supplies?

I can already tell that working on this article is going to be dangerous for my office supply budget, which isn’t so much a number as it’s the idea that I should absolutely not buy any more office supplies. The spinning pen caddy I was influenced to buy by the women of The Home Edit will not fit any more writing implements and retain its structure.

Before we begin, I would like to note that the information is not as diverse as I would like it to be. It is very easy to find Neil Gaiman’s favorite pen (Gaiman has been active on Tumblr for so long that I could probably find his favorite brand of toothpaste if I wanted to), but there is an issue of who is often granted interviews at that kind of length. Whose writing tools get to become “legendary” in the same way as Virginia Woolf’s purple ink?

Let’s dive into the goods here, shall we? Here are some of your favorite authors’ favorite pens.

I’m not big on regrets, but sadly, I regret a lot about my reading life. Most of this wasn’t revealed to me until I spent some time as an adult rereading books from my childhood and early adult years. Now that I have some time in the world and some perspective on how things are, I realize that a lot of things I think are normal, interesting, or even plain okay have been skewed by things normalized in the books I’ve read.

My first realization did not dawn on me immediately. As a teen, I preferred adult literature, and I think I might have borrowed my mother’s copy of Fortune’s Rocks by Anita Shreve. I loved this novel. Taking place at the turn of the 20th century, the book follows a precocious young teen as she falls in love and pursues a sexual relationship with her father’s 40-year-old friend. We continue to follow Olympia as she lives with the aftermath of the affair being uncovered and claws her way back to life after being marked by the scandal.

It’s a gorgeous book, with beautiful descriptions of everything from the meals to the setting to the lovemaking. I reread it every summer. Eventually, I stopped and thought, “Why is this okay?” You can make comments about Olympia’s maturity or how the book takes place in a different era, but at the end of the day, it glamorously romanticizes statutory rape. Full stop.

While I came to that realization through understanding more about grooming and appropriate relationships in real life, my next regret was more of a slap in the face. I came across a book from one of my favorite childhood series: the Anastasia Krupnik books by Lois Lowry. I remember loving reading her thoughts on life, and I was charmed that she lived in a city. I was also thrilled when she shared snarky insights about the different kids and even adults she interacted with throughout her day. Now an elementary librarian, I was curious to see if these might be books I could recommend to 4th and 5th graders, so I decided to reread. It was a mistake.

Right away, Anastasia starts making comments about a friend’s mother, who has put on weight. In my reread, I clocked three fatphobic comments disguised as maturity in the first 20 pages. That was as far as I got. I definitely hated the awful comments at face value, but even more, it stung that these blows were framed as a sign of Anastasia acting like an adult, as if judging bodies is a sign of growing up. Putting this book aside, I started thinking about other books I read as a child. I cannot remember the title, but I have a burning memory of a scene taking place at summer camp where two boys are discussing a girl. One of them said something like, “She’s fat, isn’t she?” and the other replied, “Nah, she has a great personality!” The first boy responded, “Of course she does. Fat girls always have a great personality.” The way that simple exchange has stayed with me for decades is chilling. I understood everything I needed to about my body, my perceived attitude, and my chances of having a romantic relationship by the time I was eight or nine years old. Because of books.

Although book censorship impacts every single one of us — it impacts our democracy on a nationwide level — it is the students who are most impacted by decisions made by school boards, library boards, library and school workers, politicians, local officials, and right-wing bad actors. They are the ones who lose the ability to access materials that educate, enrich, and entertain and more, given that the vast majority of books being banned right now are those by or about people of color and queer people, students know, see, and feel the impact of these decisions on them beyond the covers of those books. Marginalized teens see themselves being labeled inappropriate, disgusting, and more, all of which takes a tremendous toll on their mental health.

This week, let’s look at some of the student-run, student-organized groups fighting back against these book bans. These student groups against book bans are happening in response to situations in their own schools and communities, as well as in places that have yet to see such censorship. The list below was developed through submission, meaning that students, educators, parents, and/or library workers shared the information. It does not include the PARU group from Central York School District (PA), which you can read about here.

Take the opportunity to get to know these teenagers doing important, relevant, and vital work in their schools and communities more broadly. Follow them on social media and offer them the encouragement and support they deserve.

Putting Ballard on a master’s course list, as I’ve done a couple of times, provokes a reaction that’s both funny and illuminating. Asked to read Crash or The Atrocity Exhibition, the more vociferous students invariably express their revulsion, while the more reflective ones voice their frustration that, although the ideas might be compelling, the prose “isn’t good.” This is especially the case with students who’ve been exposed to creative writing classes: they complain that the books are so full of repetition they become machinic or monotonous; also that they lack solid, integrated characters with whom they can identify, instead endlessly breaking open any given plot or mise-en-scène to other external or even unconnected scenes, contexts, and histories, resulting in a kind of schizoid narrative space that’s full of everyone and no one.

This second group, of course, is absolutely right in its analysis; what’s funny (and, if I can teach them anything, reversible) about their judgment is that it is these very elements (repetition, machinism, schizoid hypermnesia) that make Ballard’s work so brilliant. Not only are his rhythmic cycles, in which phrases and images return in orders and arrangements that mutate and reconfigure themselves as though following some algorithm that remains beyond our grasp, at once incantatory, hallucinatory, and the very model and essence of poetry; but, mirroring the way that information, advertising, propaganda, public (and private) dialogue, and even consciousness itself run in reiterative loops and circuits, constitute a realism far exceeding that of the misnamed literary genre. If his personae are split, multiplied, dispersed, this is because they are true subjects of a networked and fragmented hypermodernity—ones for whom identification, if it is to amount to anything more than a consoling fiction, must come through man’s recognition of himself (as Georges Bataille put it) not in the degrading chains of logic but instead, with rage and ecstatic torment, in the virulence of his own phantasms.

While Ballard’s more outwardly conventional books may give us solider, more stable realities, what these realities often present—in, for example, Empire of the Sun, which is digestible enough for a blockbuster Spielberg adaptation—is a child (or childlike figure) frolicking against a backdrop provided by the destruction of an older order of reality that the world previously took for granted. It’s a cipher for his oeuvre as a whole: endlessly playing among the ruins, reassembling the broken or “found” pieces (styles, genres, codes, histories) with a passion rendered all the more intense and focused by the knowledge that it’s all—culture, the social order, the beliefs that underpin civilization—constructed, and can just as easily be unconstructed, reverse engineered back down to the barbaric shards from which it was cobbled together in the first place. To put it in Dorothean: In every context and at every level, Ballard’s gaze is fixed, fixated, on the man behind the curtain, not the wizard.

Ballard’s novels are radical in the true sense, in that they reach back to and reanimate the novel’s very roots. The presence of Robinson Crusoe in Concrete Island is glaring, as (I’d say) is that in Crash of Tristram Shandy, with its fascination for speeding mechanized land yachts and the springs of broken carriages, for the geometry of ramparts, trenches, culverts, all superimposed on Uncle Toby’s genital mutilation, his obsession with restaging assorted topologies of conflict. Or, for that matter, Don Quixote, with its hero’s obsessive reenactments on the public highways of iconic moments from popular entertainment, the triumphs and tragedies of those late-medieval movie stars, knights-errant. And doesn’t the same propensity for modulating and monotonously lullabying list-making run through Joyce, the Sinbad the Sailors and Tinbad the Tailors and Jinbad the Jailers parading through Bloom’s mind as he drifts into sleep? Doesn’t the same technoapocalyptic imaginary characterize Conrad’s bomb-carrying Professor, whose “thoughts caressed the images of ruin and destruction”? We could drag the literary cursor forward, through Ingeborg Bachmann, William S. Burroughs, Kathy Acker—or, indeed, all the way back to Homer and Aeschylus, to wheel-mounted wooden horses, flashing beacons, falling towers.

Yi Sang (1910–1937) was a writer in Korea during the thirties, when the country was under the rule of the Japanese empire. His poems, stories, letters, and essays, written in both Korean and Japanese, are celebrated as some of the finest Korean literature of his time, and bear wide-ranging influences: the Chinese classics, the general theory of relativity, and Dadaism and surrealism, both of which he is credited with introducing into the Korean literary lexicon. He wrote during a period when Koreans could be jailed without trial on the basis of mere suspicion of thought crimes, and, shortly after being imprisoned in Tokyo by Japanese authorities in 1937, succumbed to tuberculosis in a hospital at the age of twenty-seven. 

Nearly ninety years after his death, Yi Sang is perhaps best remembered for his intricate poetry, which features striking, complicated images. In the poem “Crow’s Eye View: Poem No. 15,” he writes, “I sneak into a room with a mirror. To free myself from the mirror. But the me-inside-the-mirror always enters at the same time and puts on a gloomy face. He lets me know he is sorry. Just as I am locked up because of him he is locked up shuddering because of me.” Like many of his contemporaries, Yi Sang also contributed guest columns to newspapers. These writings, collected under column titles like “Early Spring Sketches” and “Miscellany Under the Autumn Lamp,” offered incisive, humorous, and compact observations of life in Seoul in the thirties. He captured the grace and chaos of urban existence among anonymous fellow city-dwellers going about their daily routines.

The pieces that follow come from the column “Early Spring Sketches,” which was serialized from early to late March 1936. Encountering Yi Sang through these sketches offers a glimpse into a luminous spirit whose disillusionment with the modernity of his era didn’t culminate in despair but rather, as the poet John Ashbery once wrote, “broke into a rainbow of tears.”

—Jack Jung, translator

I seem to find a reason to go to CVS several times a week. Sometimes these reasons are medical, but much of the time, I am tracking down some household item or another—especially when I need something faster than it can be delivered, or I don’t want to be party to the low-level violence of same-day delivery, and I don’t feel like subjecting myself to the psychic keelhauling of a Target run. There is a unique air of desperation to most CVS locations. This is probably because CVS, as a health-care company stapled to a convenience store chain, blends the special emotional terroirs of the hospital and the gas station snack aisle. It could also be because the stores are often seriously understaffed, presumably in part due to the corporation’s recent move to slash pharmacy hours at thousands of locations. The decor is what you might call austerity-core. It is both corporate-loud (garish displays of next season’s decorations) and minimalist-clinical (pilled gray carpeting, fluorescent lights). People in pain and in search of relief, people picking up the prescriptions they need to live, and people who really want a soda all stalk the aisles.

The one unalloyed delight of CVS, though, is the soundtrack. One of the first things you notice once you start paying attention to the in-store music is how much whoever is in charge of programming loves Rod Stewart. “If you want my body and you think I’m sexy, come on, sugar, tell me so,” Rod demands as you ponder the locked cases of flu medicine. “Young hearts, be free tonight,” Rod bellows while you compare the prices of soap. Sometimes he hides behind an additional layer of mediation, as in Sheryl Crow’s version of “The First Cut Is the Deepest,” a song also notably covered by Rod. These are not the sexiest Rod songs. In fact, they are the songs where he sings from a place of impotence or regret. His lover threatens to crush him; she is too impossible to talk to; love will tear them apart. Like the shoppers whose attention the in-store loudspeaker announcements periodically try to seize, she is to be guilted, cajoled.

Big feelings reign on the CVS soundtrack. Sometimes they are overheated. Other times they are gushy, like the Sixpence None the Richer cover of “There She Goes,” the heroin anthem by the La’s, jacked up a treacly minor third from the original. (There are lots of covers on the playlist.) The emoting has a tendency to ambush you. Earlier this week I was picking up trash bags when, all of a sudden, I heard the distinctive plunk-plink-plunk-plink-plunk-plink-plunk-plink of the sad-sack opening guitar riff to “Chasing Cars” by Snow Patrol. The song depicts a couple, secure, or maybe trapped, in a bubble of self-sufficiency: “We don’t need anything or anyone.” While Rod sometimes sounds like he is delivering his come-ons with a campy wink, “Chasing Cars” contains no prophylactic against its own sentimental excess. It is an almost unbearable song to hear in CVS, regardless of the circumstances that bring you into the store. “If I lay here, if I just lay here, would you lay with me and just forget the world?” the chorus goes. Here?

The basic experience of shopping at CVS is one of doing something desperate at worst and banally unpleasant at best while swimming in a warm bath of muted musical intensity. No other retail chain is so committed to the power ballad as a musical form. A Spotify playlist of “CVS BANGERS,” apparently sourced from hard-won knowledge, features a stacked lineup: Foreigner’s “I Want to Know What Love Is”; Cutting Crew’s “(I Just) Died in Your Arms Tonight”; the Cars’ “Drive”; Toto’s still-inescapable “Africa.” One song on that playlist that I absolutely have heard in my local store is Paula Cole’s “Where Have All the Cowboys Gone?”—the nineties adult-alternative equivalent of a power ballad, a spoken/sung tale of a marriage crumbling under the weight of too much gender. Some philosophers claim that the emotions artworks evoke are really “pseudo emotions”; we feel them at one degree of remove. I can think of no better support for this thesis than the experience of listening to Paula Cole in CVS. The hopes of young love, the disappointments of middle age, the curdling resentment that ensues: I feel some inkling of it all. But mostly I’m just tapping my foot as I wait to pick up my prescription.

It was the full-body ache of our hangovers and the cigarette smoke stagnating in our hair that compelled us toward the pond. We were sat in the debris of a house party, on a sofa that had recently doubled as an ashtray, when Janique said we should go for a swim. I suggested the Kenwood Ladies’ Pond, which is free of men and harsh chemicals. 

There are five ponds in a row on the eastern edge of Hampstead Heath. They run (from south to north): the Highgate No. 1 Pond, the Highgate Men’s Pond, the Model Boating Pond, the Bird Sanctuary Pond, and, finally, set slightly apart from the others and sheltered by trees, the Kenwood Ladies’ Pond. It is accessed by a long path, behind a gate with a sign that reads WOMEN ONLY / MEN NOT ALLOWED BEYOND THIS POINT. There are two holding pens off to the side of the path, one for chaining bicycles, the other for chaining dogs. There is no pen for young children, who are not (unlike dogs and bicycles) allowed past even the first gate. As we walked through the park, I regaled my North American companion with the pond’s lore: 

The women’s pond is “a transporting haven” with a “wholesomely escapist quality” (Sharlene Teo). To swim in its “clean, glassy,” (Ava Wong Davies) “velvety water” (Esther Freud) is to “enter a new state” (Lou Stoppard)! (All of this comes from the 2019 essay collection At the Pond: Swimming at the Hampstead Ladies’ Pond, in which every piece contains the verb to glide.)

We arrived at the meadow, which, I assured Janique, is a haven of nakedness. On this particular afternoon, as we sat in the sun to change, I noticed that I was the only person who was actually naked. 

Who is Sharon Olds? Sharon Olds is an American poet, born in San Francisco in 1942. She has a Ph.D. in English from Columbia University and made her debut as a writer in 1980 with the poetry collection Satan Says. Since then, she has established herself as one of the most read, most decorated, and most controversial North American contemporary poets. “Sharon Olds’s poems are pure fire in the hands,” Michael Ondaatje has said. She became particularly well known after she refused to take part in a National Book Festival dinner organized by Laura Bush, then First Lady, in 2005, and wrote in an open letter: “So many Americans who had felt pride in our country now feel anguish and shame, for the current regime of blood, wounds and fire. I thought of the clean linens at your table, the shining knives and the flames of the candles, and I could not stomach it.”

The way I discovered her was through a poem on a particular penis, which came as a recommendation from a Finnish Swedish colleague: “Read Sharon Olds’s ‘The Pope’s Penis’!” How reading this little poem about the Pope’s sexual organ became contagious, I don’t know, but the fact is that at almost the same time, I got a text message from another colleague, who wrote that she was sitting in a waiting room somewhere reading Sharon Olds’s “The Pope’s Penis.” And here I must grab hold of you, reader, and shout, as though by international chain letter: Read Sharon Olds’s “The Pope’s Penis”! Let’s quote it in its entirety:

It hangs deep in his robes, a delicate
clapper at the center of a bell.
It moves when he moves, a ghostly fish in a
halo of silver seaweed, the hair
swaying in the dark and the heat—and at night
while his eyes sleep, it stands up
in praise of God.

The poem is an introduction to certain motifs—the body, darkness, the desire to confront, imagery, et cetera—which often appear in other equally unsettling, gripping variations and combinations elsewhere in her poetry. For example, here, in this extract from “Self-Portrait, Rear View,” in which the poem’s narrator is standing in a hotel room and, in another mirror and another light, catches sight of her fifty-four-year-old backside, “once a tight end”: