Too often I pick up a novel, dive a few chapters in when I have an hour, then haul it around with me for months on end without making progress. If you’re like me, you know that there are multitude frustrations accompanying this: the plot loses its urgency, characters lose familiarity, details that colored the […]

Not everyone loves literature in the loud and proud, raise your banner, “I was an English major!” kind of way. Many literature-lovers are the closeted bookworm variety; they are the escape artists who slip away to the inner worlds which literature so magnificently delivers. Outside of book clubs, groups formed specifically to turn reading into […]

How does a poet become a household name? This age-old question has no straightforward answer, though the oversimplified non-answer is: most don’t. The entirety of high schoolers’ exposure to poetry is too often spent on a few of the Romantics, differentiating between Shakespearean and Petrarchan sonnets, and tha-tha-tha-tha-tha-that’s all folks. Our literary canon is not […]