Magical realism is such a powerful genre. The surreal feeling of magical happenings in a realistic setting tends to make a story stick with you for longer than the average novel. In a world where hooking students on books is a constant battle, these tantalizing tales build enthusiasm for reading. It’s such a joy to connect young readers with stories that transport them in a wondrous way. The wonder is not just for kids. As an adult, some of my favorite books are middle grade magical realism novels.

I will never forget the first time I read When You Reach Me by Rebecca Stead. I finished in the middle of the night, teary and touched, and unable to put into words exactly why this book had affected me as it had. That is the power of magical realism — something unspoken but deeply felt.

Below I’ve gathered some middle grade magical realism books, many of which I frequently recommend in my elementary school library. While middle grade novels are typically geared towards kids in 4th through 8th grade, accessing these books on audio greatly increases the range of students who can enjoy. Whether you’re looking for something to recommend to a specific reader or a read aloud to entice a group, this list is an excellent place to start.

When I think of award-winning graphic novels, two immediately come to mind. They are Alison Bechdel’s Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic and Alice Oseman’s Heartstopper series. Although I’m not as well-read in graphic novels as some, I’ve read both of those. I absolutely adored them for very different reasons. People recommend Bechdel’s memoir so often and so I imagine you may have run across it before. If you haven’t read it yet, just now that it mentions suicide. Oseman’s series also has an emotionally abusive relationship and mentions past experiences of homophobia and bullying. Both are superb reads that I highly encourage every reader to pick up.

For me, I seem to go through phases. For a while I won’t read many graphic novels and then suddenly I’m reading a ton. And then something changes again, and I’m back to reading things without many pictures. It’s odd. However, I find that graphic novels are always a good addition to my reading rotation. So that leads me to my list: you never know when an award-winning graphic novel might be just the thing for your reading life. I have some fantastic ones to recommend below if you need ideas of where to start.

There are also a variety of awards in this list. I tried to choose both the best known ones and some more obscure awards to keep you guess– I mean reading. Definitely reading.

Let’s dive into 20 must-read award-winning graphic novels with something for every kind of reader.

Cats and books: it’s a pairing that goes together as well as eggs and bacon, peanut butter and jelly, or, if you’re British, a cup of tea and a biscuit. Sure, cats wake us up at 3 a.m. because they demand to be fed, but they’re also undeniably cute when they want to be. As far as I’m concerned, if cosiness were a picture, that picture would be of me reading in a comfy armchair, with — yes — a cup of tea, a blanket on my lap, and a cat purring beside me.

I know I’m not the only one to associate books and cats because not only are there lots of books about cats, there are also lots of books about cats and books.

This is what makes it tricky to rank fictional cats because I obviously want to give all the bookish cats the highest position on the list, but that’s not really how rankings work. Still, I’ve made a valiant effort. This ranking is entirely subjective, based on factors like how much I enjoyed the book, how much the cat features in it, and how lovable the cat character was.

The book The Princess Bride by S. Morgenstern doesn’t exist.

Sure, you may have read the book The Princess Bride: S. Morgenstern’s Classic Tale of True Love and High Adventure, (The “Good Parts” Version) by William Goldman, or watched the movie adaptation. Each version uses a frame narrative with the narrator skipping to “the good parts.” Still, some readers search for The Unabridged Princess Bride in person and online. Ironically, an abridged audiobook exists, furthering the myth that Goldman’s full novel is the “abridged” version.

The Princess Bride is a hilarious example of metafiction: fiction about writing fiction or satirizing its conventions. I’m glad no “unabridged” version exists. The book narrator omits tedious scenes, like Buttercup packing a suitcase. He also offers asides to readers about the cultures of the fictitious countries Florin and Guilder. In a fairy tale like this one, hints provide worldbuilding without overwhelming the story.

In Octavia E. Butler’s dystopian science fiction and fantasy novels Parable of the Sower and Parable of the Talents, Lauren Olamina founds a new religion called Earthseed. Its religious text, quoted throughout both novels, is also titled Earthseed. The fictional religion says humans will outgrow Earth and populate other planets. Earthseed draws on fears of climate change and societal collapse. No wonder some readers assume the Earthseed book is real.

Sometimes, nonexistent books become so popular, authors try to set the record straight. In Rosemary’s Baby, the 1967 horror novel by Ira Levin, All of Them Witches by J. R. Hanslet is a nonfiction book with profiles of infamous witches. It’s an important plot device that doesn’t exist outside of Levin’s novel. Many fans wrote to Levin for help finding copies of this nonexistent book. As Levin wrote back apologetically to one fan: “you are one of a number of people whom I have unwittingly sent on a wild goose chase.” The rock band All Them Witches is named after the fake book.

I don’t know about you, but in the last few years, my attention span has shrunken to an abysmal size. Or as author Ann Patchett put it: my “attention span has shrunken like a sweater accidentally thrown in the dryer.” I went from being able to read a hundred pages in one sitting to reading three pages and then getting distracted by… well, anything. A notification on my phone, the distant sound of a car horn, a bird flying past my window. My brain helpfully chiming in to remind me that I need to do laundry. My cat embarking upon a life-and-death battle with imaginary enemies.

It’s bad, folks.

I realized that this had become a real problem I needed to solve when I stood up Cat Sebastian for a Facebook Live at The Unusual Historical Romance Book Club. My brain, scattered at the best of times, somehow managed to mix up the dates of the week. I only realized what had happened the next morning, when I received a DM from Cat asking if I was all right.

That did it. I booked an appointment with my doctor and started Googling ways to improve one’s attention span. And, y’know, one’s memory. Forgetting what day of the week it is seems like the kind of thing to finally kick you into motion.

And as it turns out, it seems that I’m not alone. In December 2021, while working on an article about this topic (the first article I read when I went searching), David Oliver tweeted a question: “Do you feel like this COVID era has hurt your attention span? i.e. you can’t focus on a movie but you can watch a 30-minute show?” The responses ranged from ‘yes’ to ‘pick another topic’, but most were in agreement: the era of COVID has, indeed, affected how long we could concentrate either on movies, books, or even work.

This week, book banners showed up to the Douglas County Public Library board meeting in Colorado to protest books in the system’s collection. It is not the first time they’ve done it, and it’s also not the first time counter protestors have shown up to push back. None of this is news nor is it all that interesting; at this point, it’s pretty standard, even if there are still folks choosing to ignore this is happening in their own back yards at their public library.

What is more interesting than that, though, is looking at how these crisis actors are presenting their message and courting people to their cause. Propaganda works when an uninformed public — usually folks who aren’t engaged in the inaccurately named “culture wars” online — sees it and is appalled by what is presented. Good propaganda works because it’s convincing and presented in such a way as to appear authoritative. But y’all, this isn’t even close to good, and the book banning bigots do not even care. By presenting their false narratives in the most outrageous manner, they’re able to stoke anger and fear in new ways…and it is working.

But let’s break down what is truth here and what is spin (spoiler alert: it’s all spin). The purpose of sharing this is twofold: first, exposure matters since too many folks who care about the First Amendment Rights of all and the freedom of access are putting their heads in the sand and not looking at this stuff and second, this will help in your own talking points with friends, family, board meeting members and attendees, educators, and legislators, debunking fact from fiction.

Because sorry, that’s your job, too. You can’t not look and pretend it is not happening.

This week, U.S. Poet Laureate Ada Limón in conjunction with the Library of Congress announced that NASA’s Europa Clipper will be launching on its mission in October 2024 with “In Praise of Mystery: A Poem for Europa.” The poem, written by Limón, will travel 1.8 billion miles through the galaxy. It will be engraved on the space craft.

There has long been speculation of life on Europa beneath its ice-covered ocean. Whatever that life might look like is yet to be known, but the mission will provide vital information about the moon’s inhabitants, culture, terrain, and potential for supporting life. The Europa Clipper is expected to land on Jupiter’s moon in 2030.

More, you can have your name included as part of the mission. Anyone who’d like to sign the poem as it hurtles through space may do so at NASA’s Mission in a Bottle website. Every name included before December 31, 2023, will be engraved on a microchip to accompany the poem.

“Writing this poem was one of the greatest honors of my life, but also one of the most difficult tasks I’ve ever been assigned,” Limón said at an event held at the Library of Congress to announce the project. “Eventually, what made the poem come together was realizing that in pointing toward other planets, stars and moons, we are also recognizing the enormous gift that is our planet Earth. To point outward is also to point inward.”

NASA has launched similar projects before, allowing anyone who wished to send their name into space to do so with Artemis I and several Mars spacecraft. The current Mission in a Bottle efforts are similar to the Golden Record sent aboard the Voyager, which sent into space an array of sounds and images from across the globe into space.

There’s a shortage of good signs en route to the Preakness Stakes, the annual horse race in Baltimore best known as the Kentucky Derby’s older, less attended sibling. By good, I mean the useful types that tell you where to go. There are plenty of other kinds: ads stationed outside delis; DIY posters offering lawns, driveways, and other car-size surfaces as extremely pricey parking options; at least two hotel-related banners on propeller planes; and sandwich boards affixed to roving scalpers, which read, counterintuitively, I NEED TICKETS. The result is a ring of confused, directionless traffic around the track, where it’s easy to forget that everyone has come for a spectacle essentially premised on speed.

The lack of organization at the Preakness is appropriate; horse racing is America’s least centralized sport. There is no MLB or NFL or NBA or NHL for this game. There is a panoply of jockey clubs, trainers groups, state racing boards, owners associations, and veterinarian organizations. The racing rules change from state to state. The racing seasons change from track to track. Even the kind of race a horse runs may fluctuate with the weather. This tradition of casually maintained chaos is almost a point of pride. In 2020, when Congress passed the Horseracing Integrity and Safety Act (HISA)—a modest attempt to standardize antidoping rules across the industry—it was met with three years of bitter infighting, five federal lawsuits challenging its constitutionality, and most recently, an exquisitely melodramatic public letter from the U.S. Trotting Association that opens with a Thomas Paine quote. That is to say, it’s in the spirit of horse racing that, this past Saturday, as I approached the venue, I had no idea where to go or who was in charge, and neither, seemingly, did anyone there.

The venue was Pimlico Race Course. Of the many contrasts to be drawn between the Derby and the Preakness, most land in the former’s favor. The track is one of them. The Kentucky Derby is run at Churchill Downs—a 147-acre complex in Louisville whose 170,000-person capacity, hexagonal twin spires, and $121 million Bush Jr.–era renovation make it one of the largest, most recognizable, and most opulent race courses in the country; Pimlico isn’t even the nicest option in Maryland. It’s the second oldest racetrack in the U.S. and doesn’t look a day younger, though parts of it technically are. The original clubhouse—a “Steamboat Gothic-era” “rambling wooden Victorian confection,” as one Baltimore Sun article put it—burned to the ground in a 1966 electrical fire, leaving only a horse-and-jockey-shaped weather vane behind. The newer clubhouse, built a few years before the fire, seems to take most of its architectural influence from high school gymnasiums and the DMV. It is also, however, awesome, if you like these things more for the money and big fast animals than for the antebellum theatrics.

The clubhouse was white, brick, and not entirely full. Live racing attendance has been on a downward slide since the Reagan administration, and the pandemic and the rise of online betting platforms have only sped up the process. In 2022, Pimlico’s owners—a company formerly known as the Stronach Group, now operating under the dubiously pronounceable name 1/ST—made a play for younger audiences by setting up a music festival just off the track. This sounds like a good idea, and last year, with Megan Thee Stallion headlining alongside Lauryn Hill, it may have succeeded in bringing the median age of attendees down by a decade (in 2021, it was sixty-five). This year’s bill featured Sofi Tukker—a dance music duo comprised of a girl named Sophie and a guy named Tucker, which broke out seven years ago with a single called “Drinkee”—and Bruno Mars, an artist with fifteen Grammys and, based on the turnout, maybe as many fans. Between Friday and Saturday, racetrack and festival, this year’s event drew just 65,000 people—barely a third of the 182,000 who came out in 2019.

The pandemic seemed like a good time to read the ninety-odd novels of Balzac that comprise The Human Comedy. (Which you can get on your Kindle for ninety-nine cents, by the way.) I was definitely obsessed with Balzac in my first youth. Some lines and ideas of his were then emblazoned on my brain: the ruthless mastery an artist must have over his material to boldly cut and shape it; “the impetuous courage of the South;” the “tenacity of purpose which works miracles when it is single-minded.”

Once, in my first youth (I probably got the phrase “first youth” from Balzac), I was having dinner with my brother, Nick Lemann, and about a dozen of his friends, all journalists like him; I was sitting right smack in the middle of the table, and I was, as I recall it, the only girl. They kept talking about politics, of course, and I wasn’t interested in politics at all and still know nothing about them, so eventually I fished out a Balzac novel from my purse and started pointedly reading it in the middle of dinner at the table, amid their conversation. It was like saying, You can be interested in politics, I am interested in Balzac. 

I have no regrets about it. I was making a point! The scene is emblazoned on my brain. It was the only way I could assert myself in that context! It got their attention.

—Nancy Lemann, author of “Diary of Remorse” 

Sometimes, on the campus of the university where I work, a visiting writer will explain to a captive audience how great poems—more often than not his own—get written. These explanations often sound a bit mystical, occasionally even mystifying. So I was amused to read the opening lines of Dobby Gibson’s tongue-in-cheek “Small Craft Talk,” a poem our readers discovered in a box of paper slush, and which you’ll find in our Spring issue:

In some languages the word for dream
is the same as for music

is the kind of thing poets like to say

Before you know it, Gibson’s takedown of writing-program clichés shades into a wonder at how poems can make us feel ourselves, as Wallace Stevens once put it, “more truly and more strange”:

I first discovered opera in 1991, when my tenth-grade English teacher killed a couple of class periods by showing the movie Amadeus. The bits it contained of The Magic Flute and Don Giovanni were seductive enough to send me to the nearest outpost of the Wherehouse, a California record-store chain, where the classical and opera section was an afterthought. When I compare it to the contemporary infinity of Spotify, however, the limited selection now seems a kind of blessing: with so little to choose from, it was impossible to feel overwhelmed.

It was also an advantage not to have anyone telling me which operas were great and which were passé. Not until much later, for instance, would I learn that by the nineties, Gounod’s Faust was already a century past its prime. It debuted in Paris in 1859 and quickly became a worldwide hit, especially in the U.S., where it was chosen to inaugurate the newly founded Metropolitan Opera in 1883. But in time, Faust’s blockbuster status made it a byword for middlebrow entertainment, a bit like The Phantom of the Opera today. When Edith Wharton set the first chapter of The Age of Innocence at a performance of Faust, it was a way of critiquing the provincialism of 1870s New York from the vantage point of 1920. For instance, Wharton pokes fun at the fact that the opera, originally written in French, is sung in Italian, the language Americans were used to hearing in the opera house at the time.

The novel opens with the main characters watching the passionate love duet at the end of act 3, in which Marguerite, a virtuous young woman, is seduced by Faust, a middle-aged scholar who has sold his soul to the devil. As he begs to “caress your beauty,” she plays a game of “he loves me, he loves me not,” picking petals off a flower. It is a sign of Marguerite’s childlike innocence but also of her ambivalence: she has already fallen in love with Faust, but can’t be certain whether he really loves her or is only trying to get her into bed. She uses the game to convince herself that Faust’s love is genuine, and when she plucks the last petal with a triumphant “He loves me!” Faust immediately confirms it: “Yes, believe this flower … He loves you! Do you understand that sublime, sweet word?”

Wharton’s opera scene is the perfect opening to a novel about how old-fashioned people lived lives as passionate as our own, despite or even because of their Victorian constraints. Watching Faust, Newland Archer takes a complacent satisfaction in the idea that the young woman he’s engaged to marry, May Welland, is too innocent to understand the erotic rapture of Gounod’s music. “She doesn’t even guess what it’s all about,” Wharton writes. “And he contemplated her absorbed young face with a thrill of possessorship in which pride in his own masculine initiation was mingled with a tender reverence for her abysmal purity.” But it is this very purity that will lead him to lose interest in May and fall in love with her cousin, the Countess Olenska, whose scandalous past has taught her the meaning of “that sublime, sweet word.”

My first memory of opera is Bugs Bunny or maybe The Pink Panther Show: those Saturday-morning cartoons where the fat lady sings and shatters a glass. Much later I began to date a man who had been to hundreds of opera performances (a fact I found not only shocking but literally unbelievable) and so I went from watching no operas to almost one a month. The one I’ve enjoyed the most by far was the Met’s spring 2022 production of Gaetano Donizetti’s Lucia di Lammermoor, staged in a town in the depressed Rust Belt. I had already read about Lucia: it’s the opera that inspires Emma Bovary to cheat on her husband (again, and more dramatically). And yet I didn’t know anything about its plot, because Flaubert doesn’t describe it; the opera serves merely to connect Emma to her younger self, the pretty country girl who had had bigger dreams than a failure of a husband and a cad of an (ex-)lover. At the opera, Flaubert writes, “d’insaissibles pensées” come over her: “elusive thoughts,” uncapturable thoughts, incomprehensible thoughts. What’s coming over her is fantasy. 

Nabokov said about Emma Bovary that she was the quintessential “bad reader,” the one who reads “emotionally, in a shallow juvenile manner, putting herself in this or that female character’s place”: above all, in the place of Lucia di Lammermoor, the tragic sister of a warlord, kept from the man she loves, who slaughters her husband on their wedding night in a crazed delirium and herself dies. But to read Madame Bovary as purely reprobative seems to me cold to the point of insanity; as Flaubert said, of course, “Madame Bovary, c’est moi.” We are all fantasists, incomplete and incoherent actors in search of a character, and who can blame or even fail to admire Emma: so moved by art that she too will destroy her life for a fantasy of love, and die.

And yet I myself was not at all moved by the opera to change my life. I could admire the lead soprano Nadine Sierra’s expressiveness, virtuosity, beauty; I could delight in the claustrophobic sets, in the (perhaps a tad excessive) use of projection. But the experience was not at all like that of, say, watching a nineties film and wanting to be a slacker so badly I regretted ever getting a job. Opera, you might say, is an outdated fantasy machine: too mannered, too heroic, too … boring? 

On the other hand, I increasingly find it hard to understand what people’s epistemic relationships are to all sorts of things: the massively popular Love Is Blind is an almost mockingly Brechtian, stiff recitation of clichés (“I would call myself, maybe … an empath?” “Me too!”). The people around me who seem the most obviously engaged in absurd, even delusional, fantasies of impossible and irresistible love—the ones who take their cues from Before Sunrise, from the films of Kieślowski—are the ones who feel themselves most assuredly and assertively to be living in truth. 

Don Carlo is the kind of opera that has gone out of fashion. I cruised through half-empty rows when I saw it last fall, just days after attending a packed-to-vibrating weeknight production of The Hours – the two-act opera adaptation of a 1998 novel and its 2002 film adaptation. Verdi’s four-hour-long political tragedy, set during the Spanish Inquisition in the sixteenth century, feels more like eating your operatic vegetables. Its place in the canon was actually secured by the Met, whose onetime general manager Rudolf Bing fished it out to open the 1950 season.   

Based largely on a historical play by Friedrich Schiller, Don Carlo imagines a backstory to some real events in the life of Carlos, Prince of Asturias, who was briefly engaged to Elisabeth of Valois before she instead married his father, King Philip II of Spain. Schiller invented an anachronistic friend for Carlos: Rodrigo, Marquis of Posa, who distracts the heartsick prince with the political cause of Flemish independence. Meanwhile, Philip, bitter and paranoid over his loveless marriage, contemplates getting rid of his son and his treacherous friend with counsel from the blind and ruthless leader of the Inquisition. 

Among the work’s Shakespearean qualities—Anglophone audiences might especially recall Hamlet—is the fact that there are multiple versions of it, in both French and Italian. Verdi revised it several times between 1866 and 1886. The original libretto is in French—Don Carlos—but its five-act runtime tested even nineteenth-century audiences. Verdi then lopped off the entire first act, which shows Carlos and Elisabeth’s coup de foudre in the forest of Fontainebleau. Act 2 of the original, which became Act 1 of the more widely performed Italian translation that I saw, starts soon after Philip’s wedding, when Elisabeth has become the queen of Spain—and Carlos’s stepmother. The Met experimented with the five-act French version last season, but has since backtracked to its repertory standard. Skipping the first act deflates the opera’s romantic plot—turning the love triangle between Carlos, Philip II, and Elisabeth into mere inciting incident—but heightens its political and religious drama.

Eponym aside, Don Carlo is more vessel (for Rodrigo’s ideas) and pawn (in his father’s power games) than protagonist. Crucially, in this drama of Enlightenment values, he appears deeply irrational. He loses his composure within the first act and practically faints onto his stepmother, singing, “I love you, Elisabeth! The world is nothing!” Freeing herself from him, she counters, “Well then! So, wound your father! Come, soiled by his murder, drag your mother to the altar!” Into this void enters Rodrigo, who radiates s Reason and extols liberty, particularly for the downtrodden people of Flanders. “Lend your aid to the oppressed Flanders!” he exclaims. As they pledge their commitment to the cause in a spirited duet, Carlo seems barely conscious that he’s signing on for treachery against his own family. 

In Ben Lerner’s Leaving the Atocha Station, the narrator, Adam, goes to the Prado every morning to stand in front of the Flemish painter Rogier van der Weyden’s The Descent from the Cross. On one particular morning, another man is standing in his place, looking at the painting, and this man suddenly bursts into tears. Adam is irritated and confused: “I had long worried that I was incapable of having a profound experience of art and I had trouble believing that anyone had, at least anyone I knew.” I too have worried about this; a painting has never moved me to tears. A poem has never changed my life. This is why the opera came to me as a surprise—both my love of it and the fact that, the first time I saw La Bohème, I cried through the whole fourth act. The pathos! I was deeply moved by the tragic story and by the register of the musical spectacle, but it was something more primal, too. Here was an art form that seemed not to shy from melodrama but move into its absolute depths, and then transcend and transform them.

I love opera not as an expert, or even as an informed connoisseur. I love it as an amateur, a near-total beginner. And despite its reputation, I think opera is surprisingly accessible, in part because of its absolute embrace and elevation of human feeling. I’m sure that as I spend more time in the Family Circle seats at the Met, I will learn more, and I might even become discerning. But for now I am going for pure pleasure.

This week, we’re publishing a series of pieces on opera. Colm Tóibín shares a letter to his mother, written from the moment when he fell in love with opera; Nancy Lemannconsiders the contenders for the greatest Don Giovanni of all time; Andrew Martin recounts a visit to Nixon in China; Adam Kirsch comes to the defense of Faust. Plus, two reviews of recent opera productions, a piece adapted from Patrick Mackie’s Mozart in Motion, a dispatch from our poetry editor, and a behind-the-scenes look at the making of Michael Bazzett’s poem in our Spring issue.

In January 2016 I was given an extraordinary gift. Underneath brown paper that had softened with age and molded to the shape of the object within, I discovered a treasure almost two centuries old that revealed the life of one woman and her broader network of family and friends. It was a book, a ledger of sorts, covered in a bright magenta silk that was frayed along the edge so that a glimpse of its marbled cover was just visible. The shape of the book had distorted—it was narrow at the spine but expanded at the right edge to accommodate the contents, reminding me of my mum’s old recipe book, which had swelled over the years as newspaper cuttings and handwritten notes were added.

This book, measuring some twelve and a half inches long by eight and a half inches across, contained pale blue pages, which were unlined and unmarked. As I carefully opened the front cover and looked at the first page, my breath caught: this was indeed a marvel. Carefully pasted in place were four pieces of fabric, three of them framed in decorative waxed borders—these were scraps of silk important enough to have been memorialized. Accompanying each piece of cloth was a small handwritten note inked in neat copperplate, including a name and a date: 1838.

As I turned more leaves, a kaleidoscope of color and variety unfolded. There were small textile swatches—sometimes only two pieces at a time, and sometimes up to twelve—cut into neat rectangles or octagons and pasted in rows that blossomed across each page. The notes were written above each snippet of fabric, sometimes curving around the shape of it. I knew from the outset that this was something precious, an ephemeral piece of a life lived long ago. It was a beautiful mystery.

The elderly lady who gave me the book explained to me what she knew of its provenance, which was very little. While she was working in the London theater world in the sixties, a young man assisting her in the wardrobe department found this unusual curiosity on a market stall in Camden. He thought that the pages of the scrapbook, filled as they were with colorful textiles, might be of interest to the wardrobes of the theaters where she worked. The book remained in this lady’s possession for fifty years until she passed it on to me.

William Blake once wrote to a friend that he conversed with the Spiritual Sun on Primrose Hill. Today his words saying as much are carved on the stone curb atop the grassy knoll where the Druid Order has gathered for the Autumn Equinox since the poet’s times, and today still do. For the Druids, the primrose wards off evil and holds the keys to heaven (in German the cowslip primrose is appropriately called Himmelschlüsselchen). For herbalists it is a sedative, pain reliever, and salve. It keeps depression at bay. The primrose is the flower of youth, love, lust and sweetness, rebirth and poetry. Eating one can manifest fairies. In Albion it is among the first blooms of spring. The “rathe Primrose” is the opening flower Milton notes to strew upon the “laureate hearse” of Lycidas.

“Primrose for X” opens with Fanny Howe “tracking Blake on Primrose Hill” and twelve quatrains later ends with her on a high-speed train that “raced away from London / and Blake’s theophanies.” What she finds in the lyric interim are no golden pillars of Jerusalem or celebrity sets. No St. Paul’s Cathedral, Shard, or Wharf highlight the skyline as they do for visitors in relief on the metal panoramic sign at 66.7 meters high. Here the “unsteady skyline” is “like a graph that measures / markets, snails and heartbeats”—one of many instances in Fanny Howe’s poetry of her in-dwelling similization of the world around us, as if these comparative truths always existed as air to breathe. Meanings break free with snails and “shucked” at the end of the line that contrasts the brain with the “slippery” heart that also slips across the stanza. And how the vital heart monitor beats with the little line’s cadence “How am I still here / at every thump?”—the question posed to herself or Thou of her own life’s longevity answered by the steady pulse of spirit-touched heart, along with doubt’s silence.

“Every word must come from my acts direct,” Howe writes of poetry’s impossible task in “Philophany,” an earlier poem in her most recent collection, Love and I. “Primrose for X” comes toward the end of the book before two final poetic sequences. The placement of individual poem-to-poem sequences through the whole takes on the shape of neumatic notation, rhythm pitched to love’s life. Here lines move within snail-paced thought, the measure of attention where, as Buber describes it, “love comes to pass.” Here lines move in a spark with the restless “I,” who finds the X subjects of love’s gift among the poor immigrant women in Victoria, impoverished children, “drugged and dirty and crushed” boys of Kentish Town, and the victims of a father’s violence, half-allegorized by a machete. Catherine Sophia Boucher Blake belongs here, too, in the hidden vision—she who learned the secrets and practice of her husband’s illuminations and signed the Parish Register as bride with an “X.”

Blake loved quatrains as much as the fourteen-syllable line. “Primrose for X” is only one of three poems in Love and I written in consistent quatrains, and the longest of the three. Its symmetry doesn’t follow any set metrical or syllabic pattern like the iambic tetrameter of Blake’s “London.” Instead each quatrain’s short line-to-line syllabic variation counters the overall symmetry, unsteady rhythm bound to beating image and thought and the needs of the heart. Only one stanza is composed entirely of trimetric lines, in the alien description of the “boys hunched,” as if to heighten the nightmarish fairy-tale quality of “What is created by humans / is almost always alien.”

In the high noon heat of the big hot sun, the intersection of Broadway and Lafayette was an ouroboros. A snake eating its own tail, a snake that was not a snake at all but actually a line of mostly women—who were nearly all young and definitely all well dressed—waiting to go inside a NoHo loft to go shopping. But okay—this was not some sort of run-of-the-mill sample sale. No one waiting in that line was there just because they were looking for a little something to do on a Sunday morning in May. These girls were in line because inside that loft was a woman named Chloë Sevigny. She was there because she was selling her clothes. These girls were waiting in line because the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow was Chloë’s stuff, at an event quite literally advertised, in the promotional materials, as the Sale of the Century.

It is not that insane to wait in that ouroboros of a line for three hours, when you think about it. She’s Chloë: Harmony Korine’s muse, wearing bleached eyebrows in the movie Gummo. Dancing to the O’Jays’ “Love Train” in a subway car in Whit Stillman’s The Last Days of Disco. Appearing naked and pregnant on the cover of Playgirl. She’s the kind of celebrity who can get her one million Instagram followers to wake up early on a Sunday to buy her toothpaste. The second the sale began, it was already a viral event—like Black Friday for fashion-school freaks. TikTok, Twitter, and Instagram were flooded with vibey haul videos, memes implying sartorially motivated violence, posts about new female friendships forged in line, allusions to the Bush presidency, and suggestions that maybe you could find a girl to date among the racks? And most importantly: a reminder that “if you’re in line for Chloë Sevigny’s storage-unit sale, please stay in line.” It is true that a specific subset of New Yorkers seemed to be saying (or posting), “chloë sale! chloë sale! chloë sale!”

To be clear, I am one of these girls, a lover of Chloë, someone who has spent years showing the stylist at the hair salon a picture of her in Kids. But I did not have to stand in the ouroboros of girls, for a few important reasons. The first is that Chloë wasn’t the only person selling clothes in NoHo that afternoon. The Sale of the Century was actually put together by Liana Satenstein, a former Vogue staffer who organizes closet clean-outs for fashion icons. In addition to Chloë’s stuff, the sale also featured selections from the closets of Sally Singer, the former creative director of Vogue who now heads fashion at Amazon; Lynn Yaeger, a Vogue contributing editor known to wear whimsical Comme des Garçons frocks; and the longtime Paper magazine editor Mickey Boardman. I was Sally’s assistant at Vogue when I first moved to New York, once upon a time. Therefore, when I arrived at 676 Broadway at 11:55 A.M., I sent her a text and floated to the front of the line with my friends Anika and Sage. The other reason we got to skip the line is because it was my twenty-seventh birthday, and sometimes when you turn a new age you get lucky.