September 2015 Cover Image

The Pleasures of Hell

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Sarah Stone
...a fictional or poetic world that is stubbornly, unremittingly dark, in which no good thing can happen, and every character commits or endures horrors, tends to wind up as either comic—intentionally or unintentionally—or unreadable.
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Postpastoral Poetics: From the Idylls of the Wild to Redressing Toxic Debt

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Ravi Shankar
Postpastoral poetry floods upwards into the referent and intrudes on the phenomenology in a very different way than Hesiod or Wordsworth ever intended.
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An Interview with Ron Carlson

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Leslie Wootten
After becoming a teacher, I probably became more diagnostic, but I would say my methods, approach, and world-view have slowly evolved over time rather than radically changed.
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The Limits of Indeterminacy: A Defense of Less Difficult Poems

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Charles Harper Webb
...many of the scientific/philosophical ideas that set the Difficult ball rolling are partly or wholly untrue. Even when they are true, the consequences for poetry are much less extreme than has been supposed. The sky, as it turns out, is not falling; it has just tilted a bit.
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The Writer and the World: Nathaniel Hawthorne’s Career

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Nancy Bunge
Hawthorne's tales and novels reveal a persistent concern with the appropriate relationship between the individual and society that resolves itself into a variety of positions, clearly condemning only total conformity or total isolation.
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The Interiority of Your Feet on This Earth: An Interview with Nikky Finney

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Claire Schwartz
...part of what I’m trying to do now as a writer has everything to do with my belief in humanity. Even in battleground moments, where people were being divided by skin color and beliefs and that kind of thing, there were always people who crossed the line. We don’t have to be only who people say we are.
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Empathy for the Monster

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Carrie Shipers
Labeling someone a "monster" allows us to distinguish "them" from "us," when "us" includes people who occasionally act badly but not that badly, or so we reassure ourselves.
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