By: Rishi Janakiraman There was a wet slice of evening at the West End Poetry Festival in Carrboro, NC when I was on the balcony, catching a city-wide view: the clouds evaporated to leave a dark-jean sky, the town smelled of frying oil and cut grass, and an older gentleman who’d been leaning on a cane recited Donne to me. In particular, these four lines from the infamously-erotic Elegy 19  (“To His Mistress Going to Bed”): License my roving hands, and let them go, Before, beh

By: Claire Yang The literary world is enamored with speed. Not the speed of thought, reflection, and insight, but the speed of consumption — the desideratum of vigorously chomping through two-hundred books a year, and the shame that reels back after failing to finish your goal, or which may result in an even worse outcome, succeeding with flying colors. Reviewers, especially influencers on BookTok, have turned reading into a sort of performance: a tally of the pages devoured

By: Rishi Janakiraman There’s a style of poem that lives rent-free in almost every writing workshop in America, and also lives rent-free in the heads of all its detractors. People say you know it when you see it: first-person but a little coy about being first-person, free verse, maybe one and a half pages long, full of images so crisp they feel like they came out of a high-end camera ad, and ending with a final line that feels like it clicks shut, the “fitting surprise.” It’

By: Sophia Lee It is with no intentional exaggeration intended that I make this statement—Eucalyptus was somewhat of a major stepping...

By: Rishi Janakiraman Whenever the literary community falls hard for one writer, you can set your watch to the contrarian backlash. Ocean...

By: Rishi Janakiraman There is by now a robust, if still unofficial, discourse about how competitions like Scholastic, YoungArts, and...

When my friends ask me what my favorite book is, I don’t think I’d ever say a novel written in the past decade.