Notes, Reviews, Speculations
EPOCH’s weblog features criticism, craft essays, and interviews by editors current and former. It is updated regularly during the academic year, and occasionally during the summer.
Travelers into Drug-Land: a Review of The Drug Experience (1961)
You don’t really want a brand-new copy of The Drug Experience, anyway. That would spoil the fun. Instead, it’s best to find a copy at the library, at a second-hand bookstore, at a thrift store, or—ideally—discarded in a dumpster somewhere. You want the edition that’s dog-eared, dilapidated, book jacket shredded around the edges, yellowed pages perfumed with a reek reminiscent of expired salad dressing, the print so small and cramped that you have to squint to read it.
We Are in the Business of Feelings
How many of us have turned to writing to make sense of chaos? Still, though writing is personal, there is pressure to dismiss the personal in literary work, lest it be read as sentimental. How can we reinsert emotion back into our writing practice, without shame? How can we practice vulnerability as we brave the page? How might leaning more into emotional honesty and sincerity in our daily lives affect our writing?
Review: The Trees Witness Everything by Victoria Chang
The Trees Witness Everything concerns itself with questions and answers, mothers, inherited language, rain, light, time, dreams, violence, publication, love, hope, desire, grief, fire. Within all these elements, what does Chang do with form? Imagine that in her hands, form is a capped bottle on the windowsill and the poem is the days-old water inside it, filling with pressure and heat. This is the heat of living.
The Writer’s Guide to Ludonarrative Dissonance
While there is no ludology to a short story, we bear a similar narrative burden: how do we make it clear to a reader what it is we mean to say? There is no “player choice” to contend with, but we do have disparate elements to wrangle together under the cohesive umbrella of “story:” syntax, structure, whatever other craft buzzwords you can think of. If our story is an ironic confrontation with high society at the turn of the 19th century, for example, how might we craft a first sentence to make all of that clear to our reader, to set their expectations, to instruct them on how to read the rest of the book?
Interview: Derek Chan
The poem to me is perpetually fraught and shot through with seams of unfinished bewilderment. This is perhaps why, as multilingual poet, I find the poem as such a fertile and natural space to traverse the incommensurable distances between languages and cultures. I have an entrustment, that in the poem, the untranslatable, liminal collisions between languages are not failures, but unaccountable—and therefore inexhaustibly mysterious—enunciations in their own right, serving as generative reconfigurations of legibility, intelligibility, and sense-making.
Interview: Alexandra Chang
But the mysterious part for me, and I think other writers probably speak to this better than I do, is that feeling of reentering the story and paying very close attention to my own reactions, instead of pushing aside the feeling that something's off. In life, there’s this inclination think, “Well, if I can’t immediately pinpoint what’s causing this off feeling, then just leave it as it is.” But as a writer, it’s hard to get away with that. You have to listen to that gut feeling of something being off and actually try to figure out its source.
Is Love Tired? (a Q&A without any A’s)
Wasn’t it in Jean Cocteau’s La Belle et la Bête (1946) that the beast, upon turning human, says to his princess, “It’s as though you missed my ugliness”? Oh god, doesn’t that just hit the nail on the head? Isn’t desire all about ugliness? Must devotion and disgust always be antithetical to one another? Can they not coexist, as lust and rage do? Aren’t we all just fantastically, wonderfully, irresistibly hideous in the eyes of those who love us?
Interview: Bryn Evans
I was very observant as a child. I really enjoyed looking. That's something that still remains true today, observation and witnessing, and learning through witnessing. I was pretty quiet as a child, which is to say. And I think at times, you know, my parents and my relatives and my teachers were a bit concerned because I was so quiet, but I think I was just like a sponge. I was a sponge just absorbing everything around me. So yeah, I would say joyful observance. I enjoy the soft things of life, I always have.
Review: Sex Depression Animals by Mag Gabbert
I started reading Sex Depression Animals the same night I took my first ever dose of Lexapro. It occurred to me as I picked up the book that I’d intended to read this collection months ago (according to Goodreads, I marked it as ‘want to read’ on April 17th, a little over a month after it was published). Why had I waited so long? I could point to any number of easy excuses—rent, work, school—but I knew these were cop-outs. I put off reading for the same reason I put off consuming so many other things I know I will like but find myself avoiding: the stakes are too high.
“Sin, Men!” A Look at Holorimes
If you’ve mastered the sonnet and want to step up your poetic game, it might be time to try a holorime. While the holorime dates back centuries, it was popularized as a poetic form by Jean Goudezki in her 1892 piece, ‘Invitation’. The structure is simple: a couplet in which each line is composed of homophonic words, so that they sound exactly the same when read aloud but have entirely different meanings.
Interview: Ling Ma
“I was thinking about him in terms of masculinity. I was working at Playboy at the time, and it's a men's magazine, of course, so for every issue, we would do these fashion spreads on icons like Steve McQueen and Cary Grant, or whatever. Like, buy this pair of Persol sunglasses to emulate Steve McQueen! These icons of Western masculinity basically. And so I was thinking, ‘Well what if you were to push that extreme even further? What does hysterical masculinity look like like?’ And I just started thinking about Yetis and Sasquatch.”
Review: Blocks World by Emma Catherine Perry
In the background of Perry’s book lurk questions about our nature. Are our brains analogous to advanced AI, neural networks filled with content from the world? Should we look to our own creations to examine ourselves? Or return to the simpler species like the lobster for answers? Perry examines these ideas in relation to the speaker’s feelings but receives complex responses (“I will always swim out to save you / I will always push you away”). Ultimately, Blocks World sees a human being as a “bloodful machine,” where both its existence and its meaning are inaccessible and strange.
A Place We Have Both Left and Never Been
Chin blurs the line between speaker and poet, and her epigraph tells us that this poem is itself a hybrid form. Even within the diction, there are quick shifts from the firm, formal, and grammatical (“the resoluteness / of that first person singular”) to the colloquial and the suggestion of whispered scandal (“obsessed with a bombshell blond”). Her name, a source of pride and identity, is flung between Chinese and English, between familial history and American popular culture through sound and not meaning. The name becomes a site of a split self. As in her poetry, many histories and influences are attached.
Interview: Andrew Felsher
In October of 2022, Andrew Felsher and Yehui Zhao launched the first issue of 128 LIT, a print and online literary magazine focused on showcasing international voices and works in translation. The magazine has published excellent writers like Kim Hyesoon and Najlaa Eltom. In 2023, 128 LIT ran a chapbook contest judged by Mona Kareem, Saddiq Dzukogi, and Jacques Fux. The winner—My Women by Yuliia Iliukha, translated from Ukrainian by Hanna Leliv—will be published in 2024. A sample of Yuliia’s writing is available on 128 LIT’s website. Over email throughout November 2023, Andrew and I discussed 128 LIT’s mission to make the world larger with stories, and to collapse the distance between arbitrary borders.
Interview: Kelly Hoffer
Last May, Kelly Hoffer, poet, educator, and alum of the Literatures in English PhD program here at Cornell, released her debut collection, Undershore (Lightscatter Press, 2023). I was fortunate to attend her book launch at Buffalo Street Books, where she read to a packed room and shared the cyanotype quilt and textile book that accompany the collection. Vivid, sonic, and sensory, Undershore probes the indelible linkages between mother and child, remapping how relationships continue, even after death. Far from a memorial, Undershore enacts the work of reconstructing a self in the wake of life-altering loss. When I spoke with Kelly in September, we talked about getting out of the poem’s way, the particularities of grief, and conspiring with the dictionary.
Announcing the 2023-24 Michael Koch Memorial Guest Editors
Each year, EPOCH invites two former assistant editors to serve as guest editors in fiction and poetry. The editorships are named after Michael Koch, editor for more than 30 years, who died in 2022. The Koch Editor in Fiction for Volume 71 is Lanre Akinsiku, and the Koch Editor in Poetry is Elizabeth Rogers.
Interview: Solmaz Sharif
Last fall, Solmaz Sharif visited Cornell for the Barbara & David Zalaznick Reading Series. In addition to reading to a packed auditorium from her two books of poetry Look and Customs, and having lunch with current MFA students, she generously agreed to be interviewed for the EPOCH blog. We spoke in September, days after the police killing of Mahsa Amini and the ensuing protests in Iran. Our conversation was wide ranging, covering ideas of lineage, to the challenges of literary production, and how the loss and transformation of desire impact language.
Review: A Horse At Night by Amina Cain
Amina Cain’s latest work of creative nonfiction captures a world waiting to be written—she urges her reader to “write into falling snow, falling rain, falling leaves. Write into the dark stove. A bird of paradise. Write into the ceiling and the scalloped edge. Write into a drawing of a necklace [...] Into the times you were unhappy.” For anyone who values writing as a means of illuminating details and perspectives that wane in everyday light, this invitation is an enticing one. But what does it mean to write “into” something?
Alison Lurie’s The Cat Agent
My late wife, Alison Lurie, who lived to the age of 94, left behind a completed but unpublished manuscript of The Cat Agent, which she had worked on into her late 80s. It was her last work of fiction. She was such a meticulous writer that I had very little editing to do; her plotting was, as always, ingenious and beautifully crafted, her voice always witty and entertaining. Alison’s agent showed the book to big New York publishers, but it wasn’t destined for today’s commercial marketplace; contemporary children’s and young adult books deal with 21st-century social issues and are written in different styles from the one you’ll see in this book. It’s a little old fashioned, in the best sense: an enthusiastic, confidential way of talking to young readers as if they were old friends.
Foxes and Editors
I owe a lot to EPOCH. My first published story appeared there in 1963, when I was 21. I’d written it for Jim McConkey’s Cornell undergraduate writing class; he asked if he could submit it for me to the magazine. (Our friendship, which continued for almost 70 years until he died at 98, was interrupted only by my years living overseas.) When I saw my story, “Galina,” in print in EPOCH, I suddenly stepped up onto a plateau—an exhilarating place from which to look out on my limitless future: I was now a writer, my career aspirations indisputable.