Oct 1 2011

I. Getting to Know Dick When I signed up for Richard Poirier’s seminar at Rutgers in 1996, it was out of obligation. As an American-literature grad student (“Americanist,” in ...

May 1 2008

Say it’s 1958, you are the wife of a famous poet, and it is your turn to have the Partisan Review gang over for drinks and barbed conversation. Maybe the line from Delmore ...

Apr 1 2006

The obituary is an existence writ small, the preface to the literary afterlife. Suddenly the story, once endlessly expansive, is over, and can be condensed to a few ...