—If you’re here because you bought/received a copy of Redivider at the AWP Bookfair and found therein an unevenly-scissored Vernacular card, or were handed one by a rambling, seventh-day-stubbled (bearded?) apparition in a cheap flannel shirt who seemed to have forgotten he still had his aviators on, or picked one up from a stack/Go-Fish pile [...]

A story about Rhoda Janzen, author of the recent memoir Mennonite in a Little Black Dress—A Memoir of Going Home: before the Fall 2007 semester at Hope College in Michigan, where Rhoda teaches, I met her for a late-afternoon drink to discuss upcoming classes and some poems of mine I’d sent her.  I arrived late—she [...]

Like most lines we feed children, the schoolroom-poster slogan that promises reading will transport them to other worlds requires qualification when they’re old enough to know what “qualify” means.  When people read, they remain solidly in the parts of the world they inhabit, in their same bodies, clothes, debt, and neuroses.  If their realities change [...]

At one point during Roberto Bolaño’s The Savage Detectives, a doddering poet named Amadeo Salvatierra meets and drinks with the protagonists—Arturo Belano and Ulises Lima (Bolaño and his friend, Mario Santiago, respectively).  The boys (as Amadeo calls them) and Amadeo (as the boys call him) settle down over bottles of mezcal and tequila to discuss [...]

A friend from the Globe and I were sitting out front at the Other Side Café, back when it was warm enough to do so, having beers.  He showed me a copy of a book he was reading that looked like a galley, so I asked him where he’d gotten it.  He told me that [...]

Book critic David Ulin complains in the 9 August Los Angeles Times that a body just can’t find quiet time to read anymore, and calls the solitary act of reading a “lost art.”  He quotes Simone Weil—”without time we lose a sense of narrative, that most essential connection to who we are”—but he should have [...]